A cortical architecture on parallel hardware for motion processing in real time.

Walking through a crowd or driving on a busy street requires monitoring your own movement and that of others. The segmentation of these other, independently moving, objects is one of the most challenging tasks in vision as it requires fast and accurate computations for the disentangling of independent motion from egomotion, often in cluttered scenes. This is accomplished in our brain by the dorsal visual stream relying on heavy parallel-hierarchical processing across many areas. This study is the first to utilize the potential of such design in an artificial vision system. We emulate large parts of the dorsal stream in an abstract way and implement an architecture with six interdependent feature extraction stages (e.g., edges, stereo, optical flow, etc.). The computationally highly demanding combination of these features is used to reliably extract moving objects in real time. This way-utilizing the advantages of parallel-hierarchical design-we arrive at a novel and powerful artificial vision system that approaches richness, speed, and accuracy of visual processing in biological systems.