Demystifying the Lucas-Kanade Optical Flow Algorithm with Vivado HLS Application Note (XAPP1300)

The Lucas-Kanade (LK) algorithm for dense optical flow estimation is a widely known and adopted technique for object detection and tracking in image processing applications. This algorithm is computationally intensive and its implementation in an FPGA is challenging from both a design and a performance perspective. This application note describes how to implement the LK algorithm with the Xilinx Vivado® High-level Synthesis (HLS) tool to achieve real-time performance in the Zynq®-7000 All Programmable (AP) SoC without image quality degradation.