FPGA Implementation of a Change-Driven Image Processing Architecture for Optical Flow Computation

Optical flow computation has been extensively used for object motion estimation in image sequences. However, the results obtained by most optical flow techniques are as accurate as computationally intensive due to the large amount of data involved. A new strategy for image sequence processing has been developed; pixels of the image sequence that significantly change fire the execution of the operations related to the image processing algorithm. The data reduction achieved with this strategy allows a significant optical flow computation speed up. Furthermore, FPGAs allow the implementation of a custom data-flow architecture specially suited for this strategy. The bases of the change-driven image processing are presented, as well as the hardware custom implementation