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 x 256 pixels resolution. The execution of the motion detection algorithm and the resulting time delay is only 0.25 μs. This hardware is suited for obstacle detection, motion estimation and UAV/MAV attitude control.