Real-time, miniaturized optical sensor for motion estimation and time-to-crash detection

The paper presents a low cost, miniature sensor that is able to compute in real time (up to 1000 frames/sec) motion parameters like the degree of translation, expansion or rotation that is present in the observed scene, as well as the so-called time-to-crash (TTC), that is the time required for a moving object to collide with the sensor. The sensing principle is that of computing and analyzing the optical flow projected by the scene on the sensor focal plane, through a novel algorithmic technique, based on sparse sampling of the image and one-dimensional correlation. The hardware implementation of the algorithm is based on two custom VLSI chips: one is a CMOS image sensor, having nonstandard pixel geometry, while the other one is a digital correlator that computes at high speed the optical flow vectors. The high-level control and communication tasks are managed by a microcontroller, thus guaranteeing a high level of flexibility and adaptability of the sensor properties towards different application requirements and/or variable external conditions.