A one-bit approach for image registration

Motion estimation or optic flow computation for automatic navigation and obstacle avoidance programs running on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a challenging task. These challenges come from the requirements of real-time processing speed and small light-weight image processing hardware with very limited resources (especially memory space) embedded on the UAVs. Solutions towards both simplifying computation and saving hardware resources have recently received much interest. This paper presents an approach for image registration using binary images which addresses these two requirements. This approach uses translational information between two corresponding patches of binary images to estimate global motion. These low bit-resolution images require a very small amount of memory space to store them and allow simple logic operations such as XOR and AND to be used instead of more complex computations such as subtractions and multiplications.