Fast hardware implementation of Gabor filter based motion estimation

Motion estimation in image sequences is a fundamental issue in many applications as for instance in artificial vision and three-dimensional scene reconstruction. Among all the existing techniques, we are particularly interested in methods using Gabor filters, which are known to furnish quality results but usually require intensive calculation. A new, fast energy-based method is presented, which combines in a direct manner the energetic responses of Gabor spatio-temporal filters organized in triads. An implementation of this technique on a general purpose Digital Signal Processor (DSP) board is described and the advantages compared with Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and parallel machine approaches. Our hardware implementation attains a reasonably fast output rate (several images/second) for a better resolution than in the most recent VLSI implementations. These results open interesting perspectives for real-time implementations (such as in mobile robotics) and for the obtention of higher-level results by combining different Gabor filter techniques (for motion, edge detection, texture analysis, etc.).