<title>Calculating time-to-collision with real-time optical flow</title>

Abstract

Currently two major limitations to applying computer vision to real-time robotic vision tasks are robustness in unsimulated and uncontrolled environments, and the computational resources required for real-time operation. In particular, many current visual motion detection algorithms (optical flow) are not suited for practical applications such as crash detection because they either require highly specialized hardware or up to several minutes on a scientific workstation. A recent optical flow algorithm [C94] however has been shown to run in real-time on a standard scientific workstation and yields very accurate time-to-contact calculations.