As new technologies are invented, their commercial viability needs to be carefully examined along with their technical merits and demerits. The posit data format, proposed as a drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 float format, is one such invention that requires extensive theoretical and experimental study to identify products that can benefit from the advantages of posits for specific market segments. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical study of posit-based arithmetic vis-\`a-vis IEEE 754 compliant arithmetic for the optical flow estimation method called Lucas-Kanade (LuKa). First, we use SoftPosit and SoftFloat format emulators to perform an empirical error analysis of the LuKa method. Our study shows that the average error in LuKa with SoftPosit is an order of magnitude lower than LuKa with SoftFloat. We then present the integration of the hardware implementation of a posit adder and multiplier in a RISC-V open-source platform. We make several recommendations, along with the analysis of LuKa in the RISC-V context, for future generation platforms incorporating posit arithmetic units.

中文翻译：

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通过正算使光流变亮

随着新技术的发明，需要仔细检查其商业可行性以及其技术优缺点。提议作为IEEE 754浮点格式的直接替代品的posit数据格式就是这样一种发明，它需要大量的理论和实验研究来确定可以从posits的优势中受益的产品，以用于特定的细分市场。在本文中，我们针对称为Lucas-Kanade（LuKa）的光流估计方法，针对基于POS的IEEE 754算术进行了基于位置的算法的广泛的经验研究。首先，我们使用SoftPosit和SoftFloat格式仿真器对LuKa方法进行经验误差分析。我们的研究表明，使用SoftPosit的LuKa的平均误差比使用SoftFloat的LuKa的平均误差低一个数量级。然后，我们介绍了RISC-V开源平台中正加法器和乘法器的硬件实现的集成。对于包含正负算术单元的下一代平台，我们将对RISC-V上下文中的LuKa进行分析，并提出一些建议。