Small Vision Systems: Hardware and Implementation

Abstract

Robotic systems are becoming smaller, lower power, and cheaper, enabling their application in areas not previously considered. This is true of vision systems as well. SRI’s Small Vision Module (SVM) is a compact, inexpensive realtime device for computing dense stereo range images, which are a fundamental measurement supporting a wide range of computer vision applications. We describe hardware and software issues in the construction of the SVM, and survey implemented systems that use a similar area correlation algorithm on a variety of hardware.