EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing , 2003

Phase-based Binocular Perception of Motion-in-depth: Cortical-like Operators and aVLSI Architectures

Silvio P. Sabatini, Fabio Solari, P. Cavalleri and Giacomo M. Bisio
DIBE - University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, ITALY

In this paper we present a cortical-like strategy to obtain reliable estimates of the motions of objects in a scene toward-to/away-from the observer (motion-in-depth), from local measurements of binocular parameters derived from direct comparison of the results of monocular spatiotemporal filtering operations performed on stereo image pairs. This approach is suitable for a hardware implementation, in which such parameters can be gained via a feed-forward computation (i.e., collection, comparison, and punctual operations) on the outputs of the nodes of recurrent VLSI lattice networks, performing local computations. These networks act as efficient computational structures for embedded analog filtering operations in smart vision sensors. Extensive simulations on both synthetic and real-world image sequences prove the validity of the approach, that allows to gain high-level information about the 3-D structure of the scene, directly from sensorial data, without resorting to explicit scene reconstruction.