Evaluating optical-flow algorithms on a parallel machine

Algorithmic development of optical-flow routines is hampered by slow turnaround times (to iterate over testing, evaluation, and adjustment of the algorithm). To ease the problem, parallel implementation on a convenient general-purpose parallel machine is possible. A generic parallel pipeline structure, suitable for distributed-memory machines, has enabled parallelisation to be quickly achieved. Gradient, correlation, and phase-based methods of optical-flow detection have been constructed to demonstrate the approach. The prototypes enabled comparisons to be made between the speed when parallelised and (already known) accuracy of the three methods when parallelised, on balance favouring the correlation method. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.