A Compact Sensor for Visual Motion Detection

Thomas Röwekamp and Liliane Peters
GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology



Abstract

This article presents a new sensor system for optical flow estimation. The sensor system is characterized by real-time computation based on image frames with high resolution. The core of the system is an ASIC in digital CMOS technology which performs the optical flow computation.

Although a specialized hardware is developed, the system is characterized by means of flexibility. A generic input interface makes it well suited to be connected to standard photosensitive components and the output interface can be connected to high-level image processing modules.

Keywords: optical flow, hardware, ASIC, system design, real-time, autonomous robots, gesture recognition, vergence control