An analog VLSI chip for estimating the focus of expansion

Abstract

Attention has recently been given to the design of custom analog VLSI chips for early vision-processing problems. The key features of these tasks are simple operations performed in parallel at each pixel in an image, typically resulting in a description of the scene useful for higher-level vision. This type of processing is well suited to implementation in analog VLSI, yielding compact high-speed low-power solutions. The chip described computes the focus of expansion (FOE). The FOE is the image point that the camera is moving toward. Image features appear to expand outward from the FOE and knowledge of its location provides the direction of camera motion.