Real time Structure from Motion for Driver Assistance System

Understanding of 3D surrounding is an important problem in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Structure from Motion (SfM) is well known computer vision technique for estimating 3D structure from 2D image sequences. Inherent complexities of the SfM pose different algorithmic and implementation challenges to have an efficient enablement on embedded processor for real time processing. This paper focuses on highlighting such challenges and innovative solutions for them. The paper proposes an efficient SfM solution that has been implemented on Texas Instrument's TDA3x series of System on Chip (SoC). The TDA3x SoC contains one vector processor (known as EVE) and two C66x DSPs as co-processors which are useful for computationally intensive vision processing. The proposed SfM solution which performs Sparse Optical Flow, Fundamental matrix estimation, Triangulation, 3D points pruning consumes 42% of EVE and 10% of one DSP for 25 fps processing of one mega pixel image resolution.