Towards an intelligent vision processor

An image processing system that would match the capabilities of the human eye and brain combination will probably elude us for many years, but, by observing all the lessons that millions of years of evolution taught, we can produce systems which, for specific applications can approach human capabilities. This paper describes our intelligent vision processor project which couples a pair of optical sensors incorporating a reconfigurable processor directly to an FPGA installed on a PCIexpress card. This FPGA implements a version of the symmetric dynamic programming stereo algorithm: this is more compact and generates smaller latency than a correlation algorithm.