FPGA-based real-time optical-flow system

We describe a pipelined optical-flow processing system that works as a virtual motion sensor. It is based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device enabling the easy change of configuring parameters to adapt the sensor to different speeds, light conditions and other environmental factors. We refer to it as a "virtual sensor" because it consists of a conventional camera as front-end supported by an FPGA processing device, which embeds the frame grabber, optical-flow algorithm implementation, output module, and some configuration and storage circuitry. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that presents a fully stand-alone optical-flow processing system to include measurements of the platform performance in terms of accuracy and speed.