Intelligent vision processor

It is easy to give a robot or other device trying to emulate human ability an 'eye'. Some cameras even exceed the powers of human eyes, but the computations just to measure depth (without interpreting the scene further) are handled by our brain's extraordinary parallel capabilities and are beyond the ability of any modem single processor. We describe an implementation of a vision system in reconfigurable hardware which measures scene depths at similar to 25 fps in 1 Mpixel images. This implementation uses look-up tables to remove camera distortions and misalignments and Symmetric Dynamic Programming Stereo for matching. It produces depth maps with latencies < 100 scan lines (< 3ms) for a large misalignment (5 degrees). Latency can be reduced by precise alignment and lower distortion lenses.