An FPGA implementation of insect-inspired motion detector for high-speed vision systems

In this paper, an array of biologically inspired elementary motion detectors (EMDs) is implemented on an FPGA (field programmable gate array) platform. The well-known Reichardt-type EMD, modeling the insect's visual signal processing system, is very sensitive to motion direction and has low computational cost. A modified structure of EMD is used to detect local optical flow. Six templates of receptive fields, according to the fly's vision system, are designed for simple ego-motion estimation. The results of several typical experiments demonstrate local detection of optical flow and simple motion estimation under specific backgrounds. The performance of the real-time implementation is sufficient to deal with a video frame rate of 350 fps at 256 times 256 pixels resolution. The execution of the motion detection algorithm and the resulting time delay is only 0.25 mus. This hardware is suited for obstacle detection, motion estimation and UAV/MAV attitude control.