Hardware design of a 2-D motion estimation system based on the Hough transform

A novel feature-domain two-dimensional (2-D) motion estimation system based on the straight-line Hough transform (SLHT) is presented. This system implements the motion estimation technique proposed in an earlier work that represents objects uniquely by straight-line approximations of the boundary {(/spl theta/, p)} and estimates the motion parameters from shifts in the /spl theta/-p space. It operates on 256/spl times/256 pixel binary images and consists of two main blocks. The first block does preprocessing work including smoothening the boundary, tracing and integrating the contours, and detecting dominant points. The second block computes the Hough transform on contour segments as well as the rotation and translation parameters. Each of the modules has been implemented (gate level) and simulated using Mentor Graphics tools. Finally, the experimental results have been presented and compared with the results of the software implementation.