High Performance Parallel Optical Flow Algorithms on the Sony Playstation 3.
Pascal Gwosdek, Andreas Bruhn, Joachim Weickert · Vision Modeling and Visualization · 2008
In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of the Cell Processor built into the Sony Playstation 3 for variational optical flow computation. This is done by the example of the combined-local-global (CLG) method, a recent variational technique that requires to solve large and sparse linear systems of equations. Starting from efficient numerical algorithms for sequential architectures, we successively develop specifically adapted parallel variants for the Cell Processor. This includes the design of suitable numerical algorithms, the consideration of the specific memory and processor layout as well as the exploitation of instruction level parallelism (SIMD). The obtained results show that our parallelisation efforts pay off: With more than 170 dense flow fields of size 316 252 per second we achieve frame rates far beyond real-time.