Very low power parallel implementation of stereo vision algorithm on a solar cell powered MIMD many core architecture

We present wavefront/systolic algorithms for efficient implementation of Stereo Vision (SV) computation on a novel and very low power many core MIMD architecture, the IntellaSys S40C18. For Sum of Squared Differences (SSD) and Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) SV algorithms with a disparity range of 16 pixels, we have achieved a performance of up to 25 frames per second (fps) for 348×288 images while consuming only 75mW. To our knowledge, this seems to be one of the best performances in terms of fps per watt results for the SV computation. We have also developed and implemented a simple Obstacle Avoidance (OA) algorithm based on the resulting depth map by the SV computation. We have achieved a performance of 21 steering maneuvers per second while consuming 72mW of power. This very limited power consumption indeed enables the use of solar cells as the main source of power for the computing architecture. Such a high performance and low power computing system could enable new capabilities for many aerospace applications and encourage investigations for space qualification of the architecture.