High speed computation of the optical flow

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a compact system for high speed computation of the optical flow. This system consists of one off-the-shelf PCI board with one Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip, and its host computer. With this system, we can generate dense vector maps at (1) 840 frames per second (fps) in small size (320 × 240) images, and (2) 30 fps in standard size (640 × 480) images by configuring different circuits on the FPGA chip. In the two circuits, vectors for all pixels in the images are obtained by the area-based matching (windows of 7 × 7 pixels are compared with 121 and 441 windows in the target image respectively). The circuits implemented on the FPGA do not require any special hardware resources, and can be implemented on many off-the-shelf FPGA boards shipped from many vendors. This system can also be used for the stereo vision by slightly modifying the circuits, and achieve the same performance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.