FPGA-based implementation of optical flow algorithm

In this paper, we describe an FPGA implementation of the optical flow (OF) algorithm for real time estimation of moving objects from a video sequence. Lucas-Kanade (LK) approach has been chosen to meet the real time and hardware resource constraints. In our approach, to allow accurate calculation, we adopt a high level synthesis approach to increase the accuracy of the system and to more deal with fixed-point precision. Hardware designs of the architectures are performed using Xilinx System Generator from Xilinx (XSG) and Modelsim tools. The proposed architecture is validated by a hardware co-simulation.