On the study of VLSI derivation for optical flow estimation

In this paper we propose studying several ways to implement a realistic and efficient VLSI design for a gradient-based dense motion estimator. The kind of estimator we focus on belongs to the class of differential methods. It is classically based on the optical how constraint equation in association with a smoothness regularization term and also incorporates robust cost functions to alleviate the influence of large residuals. This estimator is expressed as the minimization of a global energy function defined within the framework of an incremental formulation associated with a multiresolution setup. In order to make possible the conception of efficient hardware, we consider a modified minimization strategy. This new minimization strategy is not only well suited to VLSI derivation, it is also very efficient in terms of quality of the result. The complete VLSI derivation is realized using high-level specifications.