Specialized Architectures for Optical Flow Computation: A Performance Comparison of ASIC, DSP, and Multi-DSP

Abstract

In this paper we present three specialized architectures for optical flow computation based on: i) an ASIC in CMOS standard cell technology, ii) a single DSP TMS320C40, and ii) a TMS320C40-based multiprocessor. The pros and cons of each architecture are discussed. keywords: optical flow estimation, ASIC, multi-DSP 1 Introduction Autonomous mobile vehicles, e.g., service robots, must be able to detect dynamic obstacles and to avoid collisions through navigation manoeuvres. Most robot vision approaches for this task are based on optical flow methods, leading to systems that consist of two parts, e.g., [4]. In the low-level part, the optical flow is calculated from image sequences. In the subsequent high-level part, parameters like direction-of-impact and time-to-impact are determined from the optical flow. The most important requirements for an autonomous robot vision system are: i) real-time capability and ii) constrained form factors. Collision avoidance is a task where hard timi...