Computation of Smooth Optical Flow in a Feedback Connected Analog Network外文文献论文.pdfVIP

Computation of Smooth Optical Flow in a Feedback Connected Analog Network Alan Stocker  Rodney Douglas Institute of Neuroinformatics Institute of Neuroinformatics University and ETH Z¨urich University and ETH Z¨urich Winterthurerstrasse 190 Winterthurerstrasse 190 8057 Z¨urich, Switzerland 8057 Z¨urich, Switzerland Abstract In 1986, Tanner and Mead [1] implemented an interesting constraint sat- isfaction circuit for global motion sensing in aVLSI. We report here a new and improved aVLSI implementation that provides smooth optical flow as well as global motion in a two dimensional visual field. The com- putation of optical flow is an ill-posed problem, which expresses itself as the aperture problem. However, the optical flow can be estimated by the use of regularization methods, in which additional constraints are intro- duced in terms of a global energy functional that must be minimized. We show how the algorithmic constraints of Horn and Schunck [2] on com- puting smooth optical flow can be mapped onto the physical constraints of an equivalent electronic network. 1 Motivation The perception of apparent motion is crucial for navigation. Knowledge of local motion of the environment relative to the observer simplifies the calculation of important tasks such as time-to-contact or focus-of-expansion. There are several methods to compute optical flow. They have the common problem that their computational load is large. This is a severe disadvantage for autonomous agents, whose computational power is restricted by energy, size and weight. Here we show how the global regularization approach which is necessary to solve for the