Image-sequence motion estimation for the Dervish mine-clearance vehicle

The paper reports on the application of block matching with spatial transforms to image sequences of ground scenes taken from a moving camera. The motion is a general combination of rotation and translation. The use of spatial transforms with interpolation filtering to generate rotation reference templates and the hardware implementation, for use on a robot mine-clearance vehicle, are novel. It is shown that the emerging generation of single chip floating-point digital signal processors and CMOS image sensors are well suited to rapid prototyping of image sequence analysis, which has previously been the domain of expensive camera and custom VLSI hardware or cumbersome parallel machines