Real-time accurate optical flow-based motion sensor

An accurate real-time motion sensor implemented in an FPGA is introduced in this paper. This sensor applies an optical flow algorithm based on ridge regression to solve the collinear problem existing in traditional least squares methods. It additionally applies extensive temporal smoothing of the image sequence derivatives to improve the accuracy of its optical flow estimates. Implemented on a customized embedded FPGA platform, it is capable of processing 60 320 × 240 images or 15 640 × 480 images per second. By evaluating its accuracy on synthetic sequences, it is shown here that the proposed design achieves very high accuracy compared to other known hardware-based designs.