Change-driven image architecture on FPGA with adaptive threshold 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 foundations of the change-driven image processing are presented, as well as the hardware custom implementation in an EP20K1000C FPGA showing the achieved performance.