Parallelization of the optical flow computation in sequences from moving cameras

Abstract This paper presents a flexible and scalable approach to the parallelization of the computation of optical flow. This approach is based on data parallel distribution. Images are divided into several subimages processed by a software pipeline while respecting dependencies between computation stages. The parallelization has been implemented in three different infrastructures: shared, distributed memory, and hybrid to show its conceptual flexibility and scalability. A significant improvement in performance was obtained in all three cases. These versions have been used to compute the optical flow of video sequences taken in adverse conditions, with a moving camera and natural-light conditions, on board a conventional vehicle traveling on public roads. The parallelization adopted has been developed from the analysis of dependencies presented by the well-known Lucas-Kanade algorithm, using a sequential version developed at the University of Porto as the starting point.