Depth from a Motion Algorithm and a Hardware Architecture for Smart Cameras

Applications such as autonomous navigation, robot vision, and autonomous flying require depth map information of a scene. Depth can be estimated by using a single moving camera (depth from motion). However, the traditional depth from motion algorithms have low processing speeds and high hardware requirements that limit the embedded capabilities. In this work, we propose a hardware architecture for depth from motion that consists of a flow/depth transformation and a new optical flow algorithm. Our optical flow formulation consists in an extension of the stereo matching problem. A pixel-parallel/window-parallel approach where a correlation function based on the sum of absolute difference (SAD) computes the optical flow is proposed. Further, in order to improve the SAD, the curl of the intensity gradient as a preprocessing step is proposed. Experimental results demonstrated that it is possible to reach higher accuracy (90% of accuracy) compared with previous Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based optical flow algorithms. For the depth estimation, our algorithm delivers dense maps with motion and depth information on all image pixels, with a processing speed up to 128 times faster than that of previous work, making it possible to achieve high performance in the context of embedded applications.