Temporally forward nonlinear scale space for high frame rate and ultra-low delay a-kaze matching system

High frame rate and ultra-low delay are the most essential requirements for building excellent human-machine-interaction systems. As a state-of-the-art local keypoint detection and feature extraction algorithm, A-KAZE shows high accuracy and robustness. Nonlinear scale space is one of the most important modules in A-KAZE, but it not only has at least one frame delay and but also is not hardware friendly. This paper proposes a hardware oriented nonlinear scale space for high frame rate and ultra-low delay A-KAZE matching system. In the proposed matching system, one part of nonlinear scale space is temporally forward and calculated in the previous frame (proposal #1), so that the processing delay is reduced to be less than 1 ms. To improve the matching accuracy affected by proposal #1, pre-adjustment of nonlinear scale (proposal #2) is proposed. Previous two frames are used to do motion estimation to predict the motion vector between previous frame and current frame. For further improvement of matching accuracy, pixel-level pre-adjustment (proposal #3) is proposed. The pre-adjustment changes from block-level to pixel-level, each pixel is assigned an unique motion vector. Experimental results prove that the proposed matching system shows average matching accuracy higher than 95% which is 5.88% higher than the existing high frame rate and ultra-low delay matching system. As for hardware performance, the proposed matching system processes VGA videos (640-480 pixels/frame) at the speed of 784 frame/second (fps) with a delay of 0.978 ms/frame.