Parallelization of the estimation algorithm of the 3D structure tensor

The three dimensional structure tensor algorithm (3D-STA) is often used in image processing applications to compute the optical flow or to detect local 3D structures and their directions. This algorithm is computationally expensive due to many computations that are required to calculate the gradient, the tensor, and to smooth every pixel of the image frames. Therefore, it is important to parallelize the implementation to achieve high performance. In this paper we present two parallel implementations of 3D-STA; namely moderately parallelized and highly parallelized implementation, on a massively parallel reconfigurable array. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the generated code and results are compared with another optical flow implementation. The throughput achieved by the moderately parallelized implementation is approximately half of the throughput of the Optical flow implementation, whereas the highly parallelized implementation results in a 2x gain in throughput as compared to the optical flow implementation.