A High Speed Image Processing System Utilized in Autonomous Vehicle Guidance

The sampling is usually performed by a TV-camera at a rate of 25 to 60 images per second, depending on Concepts for guiding the design of hardware struc- the TV standard used. lV standards have been defined tures for dynamic vision are presented. The most in accordance with the abilities of the human eye important ones are the utilization of temporal coher- which cannot detect any discontinuity of motion in a ence of natural dynamic scenes by evaluating every sampled scene, for instance in a movie, if the image single image produced by a TV-camera, and a high frequency is higher than about 20 Hz. If the goal is to degree of flexibility in allocating resources within the design a vision system Of similar temporal resolution as sytem dynamically in a data dependent way. A multi- the human eye the application of a standard TV camera microprocessor system, BW 2, implementing these and the evaluation of every image it produces seem a ideas, has been realized. Its application in guiding an sensible approach. autonomous road vehicle at high speed is described. Most material objects which are visible in any natural scene have a significant mass. Therefore, their motions are typically smooth and of limited acceleration. When such a scene is projected on a 2-D image plane, often the motions in the image plane are smooth, too. If the scene is sampled by a TV-camera