  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.
