High-speed log-polar time to crash calculation for mobile vehicles

摘要

Time to impact computation is one of the applications of the image optical flow. It is useful in vehicle crash detection or robotic navigation. A high-speed image acquisition and computation rate is necessary in most of these applications. The main problem of time to impact computation from optical flow is the accuracy; accurate results usually need complex and slow computations not affordable for the fast time reaction of a vehicle or robot. Using log-polar images reduces the amount of data to be processed thus increasing speed and accuracy of results. Most optical flow techniques are inadequate to obtain high rate time to impact measurements, since they rely on complex static calculations on few images of the sequence. In our approach the time to impact is calculated using simple but fast algorithms over a high amount of images to have accurate results. 1