An MPEG-processor-based robot vision system for real-time detection of moving objects by a moving observer

This paper describes a PC-based vision system that can be used to detect moving objects from a mobile robot. An image processing board equipped with an MPEG motion estimation processor calculates a sparse but robust optic flow in real-time. An algorithm to evaluate this kind of optic flow has been realized in software. It determines relevant motion parameters and a simple scene interpretation in terms of moving object regions. The image processing board and the algorithm are presented in some detail; the performance of the system is demonstrated by experiments.