Optical Flow on the Ambric Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA)

Abstract

The Ambric Massively Parallel Processor Array (MPPA) is a device that contains 336 32-bit RISC processors and is appropriate for embedded systems due to its relatively small physical and power footprint. Optical flow is a computationally-demanding and highly parallelizeable image-processing algorithm with applications in embedded systems such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. An optical flow algorithm is implemented on the Ambric device and is shown to achieve near FPGA performance at similar levels of power consumption while requiring many fewer lines of code (Java) than its FPGA counterpart (VHDL).