Image-sequence motion estimation for the Dervish mine-clearance vehicle

The paper reports on the application of block matching with spatial transfo rms to image sequences of ground scenes taken from a moving camera. The mot ion is a general combination of rotation and translation. The use of spatia l transforms with interpolation filtering to generate rotation reference te mplates and the hardware implementation, for use on a robot mine-clearance vehicle, are novel. It is shown that the emerging generation of single chip floating-point digital signal processors and CMOS image sensors are well s uited to rapid prototyping of image sequence analysis, which has previously been the domain of expensive camera and custom VLSI hardware or cumbersome parallel machines.