Hardware-based optical flow acceleration

An optical flow accelerator (OFA) which provides hardware-based acceleration of optical flow and stereo disparity determination is described. A system is described which includes an OFA configured to determine a first optical flow using a first disparity search technique, and to determine a second optical flow using a second disparity search technique that is different from the first disparity search technique. The system also includes a processor configured to combine the first optical flow and the second optical flow to generate a third optical flow. In some implementations, the first and second disparity search techniques are based upon Semi-Global Matching (SGM). In some implementations, the OFA is further configurable to determine stereo disparity.