Parallel motion computing on the MasPar MP-2 machine

Past research has shown that qualitative information about visual motion can be recovered by analyzing the optical flow-the 2D projection on the image plane of the 3D instantaneous velocities of points lying on visible moving surfaces in a dynamic scene. The main problem in calculating the optical flow is the expensive computational time. One approach to optical flow calculations in real time is to use parallel computers. We describe how the well known technique proposed by Horn and Schunck (1981) to compute the optical flow con be implemented on a SIMD machine such as the MasPar. We describe some experimental tests to show how, with a such machine, it is possible to obtain real-time speeds in optical flow computation