Event cameras are ideally suited to capture HDR visual information without blur but perform poorly on static or slowly changing scenes. Conversely, conventional image sensors measure absolute intensity of slowly changing scenes effectively but do poorly on high dynamic range or quickly changing scenes. In this paper, we present an event-based video reconstruction pipeline for High Dynamic Range (HDR) scenarios. The proposed algorithm includes a frame augmentation pre-processing step that deblurs and temporally interpolates frame data using events. The augmented frame and event data are then fused using a novel asynchronous Kalman filter under a unifying uncertainty model for both sensors. Our experimental results are evaluated on both publicly available datasets with challenging lighting conditions and fast motions and our new dataset with HDR reference. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both absolute intensity error (48% reduction) and image similarity indexes (average 11% improvement).
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Uber Advanced Technologies Group（优步先进技术集团）
Existing multi-camera SLAM systems assume synchronized shutters for all cameras, which is often not the case in practice. In this work, we propose a generalized multi-camera SLAM formulation which accounts for asynchronous sensor observations. Our framework integrates a continuous-time motion model to relate information across asynchronous multi-frames during tracking, local mapping, and loop closing. For evaluation, we collected AMV-Bench, a challenging new SLAM dataset covering 482 km of driving recorded using our asynchronous multi-camera robotic platform. AMV-Bench is over an order of magn…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology（国防科技创新研究院）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center（天津人工智能创新中心）
Recently, the emerging bio-inspired event cameras have demonstrated potentials for a wide range of robotic applications in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose a novel fast and asynchronous event-based corner detection method which is called FA-Harris. FA-Harris consists of several components, including an event filter, a Global Surface of Active Events (G-SAE) maintaining unit, a corner candidate selecting unit, and a corner candidate refining unit. The proposed G-SAE maintenance algorithm and corner candidate selection algorithm greatly enhance the real-time performance for corner…
In real-world applications the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem should generally be applied in a sequence of images which a set of drift-prone features are tracked over time. In this paper, we consider both the temporal dependency of camera poses and the uncertainty of features for the sequential camera pose estimation. Using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), a priori estimate of the camera pose is calculated from the camera motion model and then corrected by minimizing the reprojection error of the reference points. Experimental results, using both simulated and real data, demonstrate that t…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Everest Innovation Technology（珠峰创新科技）
Temporal camera relocalization estimates the pose with respect to each video frame in sequence, as opposed to one-shot relocalization which focuses on a still image. Even though the time dependency has been taken into account, current temporal relocalization methods still generally underperform the state-of-the-art one-shot approaches in terms of accuracy. In this work, we improve the temporal relocalization method by using a network architecture that incorporates Kalman filtering (KFNet) for online camera relocalization. In particular, KFNet extends the scene coordinate regression problem to …
Human motion capture is frequently used to study rehabilitation and clinical problems, as well as to provide realistic animation for the entertainment industry. IMU-based systems, as well as Marker-based motion tracking systems, are the most popular methods to track movement due to their low cost of implementation and lightweight. This paper proposes a quaternion-based Extended Kalman filter approach to recover the human leg segments motions with a set of IMU sensors data fused with camera-marker system data. In this paper, an Extended Kalman Filter approach is developed to fuse the data of tw…
Xiamen University Malaysia（厦门大学马来西亚分校）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Event-based camera is a bio-inspired vision sensor that records intensity changes (called event) asynchronously in each pixel. As an instance of event-based camera, Dynamic and Active-pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) combines a standard camera and an event-based camera. However, traditional models could not deal with the event stream asynchronously. To analyze the event stream asynchronously, most existing approaches accumulate events within a certain time interval and treat the accumulated events as a synchronous frame, which wastes the intensity change information and weakens the advantages of DA…
Event-based cameras, also known as neuromorphic cameras, are bioinspired sensors able to perceive changes in the scene at high frequency with low power consumption. Becoming available only very recently, a limited amount of work addresses object detection on these devices. In this paper we propose two neural networks architectures for object detection: YOLE, which integrates the events into surfaces and uses a frame-based model to process them, and fcYOLE, an asynchronous event-based fully convolutional network which uses a novel and general formalization of the convolutional and max pooling l…
We present a method that leverages the complementarity of event cameras and standard cameras to track visual features with low-latency. Event cameras are novel sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes, called "events". They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, because the same scene pattern can produce different events depending on the motion direction, establishing event correspondences across time is challenging. By contrast, standard cameras provide intensity measu…
3D Trajectory Reconstruction of Moving Points Based on Asynchronous Cameras
College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（航空科学与工程学院，国防科技大学）；Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation（湖南省图像测量与视觉导航重点实验室）
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61中心）
Spatial convolution is arguably the most fundamental of 2D image processing operations. Conventional spatial image convolution can only be applied to a conventional image, that is, an array of pixel values (or similar image representation) that are associated with a single instant in time. Event cameras have serial, asynchronous output with no natural notion of an image frame, and each event arrives with a different timestamp. In this paper, we propose a method to compute the convolution of a linear spatial kernel with the output of an event camera. The approach operates on the event stream ou…
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Event cameras, i.e., the Dynamic and Active-pixel Vision Sensor (DAVIS) ones, capture the intensity changes in the scene and generates a stream of events in an asynchronous fashion. The output rate of such cameras can reach up to 10 million events per second in high dynamic environments. DAVIS cameras use novel vision sensors that mimic human eyes. Their attractive attributes, such as high output rate, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and high pixel bandwidth, make them an ideal solution for applications that require high-frequency tracking. Moreover, applications that operate in challenging lighting…
Event cameras open up new possibilities for robotic perception due to their low latency and high dynamic range. On the other hand, developing effective event-based vision algorithms that fully exploit the beneficial properties of event cameras remains work in progress. In this paper, we focus on event-based visual odometry (VO). While existing event-driven VO pipelines have adopted continuous-time representations to asynchronously process event data, they either assume a known map, restrict the camera to planar trajectories, or integrate other sensors into the system. Towards map-free event-on…
State-of-the-art machine-learning methods for event cameras treat events as dense representations and process them with conventional deep neural networks. Thus, they fail to maintain the sparsity and asynchronous nature of event data, thereby imposing significant computation and latency constraints on downstream systems. A recent line of work tackles this issue by modeling events as spatiotemporally evolving graphs that can be efficiently and asynchronously processed using graph neural networks. These works showed impressive computation reductions, yet their accuracy is still limited by the sm…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Capital Normal University（首都师范大学）
Event cameras are novel neuromorphic vision sensors with ultrahigh temporal resolution and low latency, both in the order of microseconds. Instead of image frames, event cameras generate an asynchronous event stream of per-pixel intensity changes with precise timestamps. The resulting sparse data structure impedes applying many conventional computer vision techniques to event streams, and specific algorithms should be designed to leverage the information provided by event cameras. We propose a corner detection algorithm, eSUSAN, inspired by the conventional SUSAN (smallest univalue segment ass…
Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes instead of standard intensity frames. They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, due to the fundamentally different structure of the sensor's output, new algorithms that exploit the high temporal resolution and the asynchronous nature of the sensor are required. Recent work has shown that a continuous-time representation of the event camera pose can deal with the high temporal resolution and…
Event cameras, which are asynchronous bio-inspired vision sensors, have shown great potential in a variety of situations, such as fast motion and low illumination scenes. However, most of the event-based object tracking methods are designed for scenarios with untextured objects and uncluttered backgrounds. There are few event-based object tracking methods that support bounding box-based object tracking. The main idea behind this work is to propose an asynchronous Event-based Tracking-by-Detection (ETD) method for generic bounding box-based object tracking. To achieve this goal, we present an A…
Asynchronous Multi-Object Tracking with an Event Camera
Systems Theory and Robotics Group, Australian National University（系统理论与机器人组，澳大利亚国立大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科学与技术组）；Centre for Advanced Defence Research in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (CADR-RAS) project UA216424-S08（机器人与自主系统高级国防研究中心（CADR-RAS）项目UA216424-S08）
This paper presents a method for capturing high-speed video using an asynchronous camera array. Our method sequentially fires each sensor in a camera array with a small time offset and assembles captured frames into a high-speed video according to the time stamps. The resulting video, however, suffers from parallax jittering caused by the viewpoint difference among sensors in the camera array. To address this problem, we develop a dedicated novel view synthesis algorithm that transforms the video frames as if they were captured by a single reference sensor. Specifically, for any frame from a n…
University of Turku（图尔库大学）；Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)（瑞典皇家理工学院（KTH））；King Faisal University（费萨尔国王大学）
Moving towards autonomy, unmanned vehicles rely heavily on state-of-the-art collision avoidance systems (CAS). However, the detection of obstacles especially during night-time is still a challenging task since the lighting conditions are not sufficient for traditional cameras to function properly. Therefore, we exploit the powerful attributes of event-based cameras to perform obstacle detection in low lighting conditions. Event cameras trigger events asynchronously at high output temporal rate with high dynamic range of up to 120 $dB$. The algorithm filters background activity noise and extrac…
Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich（苏黎世大学机器人与感知组）
Event cameras are novel vision sensors that report per-pixel brightness changes as a stream of asynchronous "events". They offer significant advantages compared to standard cameras due to their high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and lack of motion blur. However, events only measure the varying component of the visual signal, which limits their ability to encode scene context. By contrast, standard cameras measure absolute intensity frames, which capture a much richer representation of the scene. Both sensors are thus complementary. However, due to the asynchronous nature of events, c…
Università degli Studi di Genoa（热那亚大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）
This paper investigates trajectory prediction for robotics, to improve the interaction of robots with moving targets, such as catching a bouncing ball. Unexpected, highly-non-linear trajectories cannot easily be predicted with regression-based fitting procedures, therefore we apply state of the art machine learning, specifically based on Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) architectures. In addition, fast moving targets are better sensed using event cameras, which produce an asynchronous output triggered by spatial change, rather than at fixed temporal intervals as with traditional cameras. We inves…
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Event cameras provide asynchronous, data-driven measurements of local temporal contrast over a large dynamic range with extremely high temporal resolution. Conventional cameras capture low-frequency reference intensity information. These two sensor modalities provide complementary information. We propose a computationally efficient, asynchronous filter that continuously fuses image frames and events into a single high-temporal-resolution, high-dynamic-range image state. In absence of conventional image frames, the filter can be run on events only. We present experimental results on high-speed,…
University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
Event-based cameras are biologically inspired sensors that output asynchronous pixel-wise brightness changes in the scene called events. They have a high dynamic range and temporal resolution of a microsecond, opposed to standard cameras that output frames at fixed frame rates and suffer from motion blur. Forming stereo pairs of such cameras can open novel application possibilities, since for each event depth can be readily estimated; however, to fully exploit asynchronous nature of the sensor and avoid fixed time interval event accumulation, stereo event lifetime estimation should be employed…
We present a different approach of feature point detection for improving the accuracy of SLAM using single, monocular camera. Traditionally, Harris Corner detection, SURF or FAST corner detectors are used for finding feature points of interest in the image. We replace this with another approach, which involves building a non-linear scale-space representation of images using Perona and Malik Diffusion equation and computing the scale normalized Hessian at multiple scale levels (KAZE feature). The feature points so detected are used to estimate the state and pose of a mono camera using extended …
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Event-based cameras are dynamic vision sensors that provide asynchronous measurements of changes in per-pixel brightness at a microsecond level. This makes them significantly faster than conventional frame-based cameras, and an appealing choice for high-speed navigation. While an interesting sensor modality, this asynchronously streamed event data poses a challenge for machine learning techniques that are more suited for frame-based data. In this paper, we present an event variational autoencoder and show that it is feasible to learn compact representations directly from asynchronous spatiotem…
New vision sensors, such as the Dynamic and Active-pixel Vision sensor (DAVIS), incorporate a conventional global-shutter camera and an event-based sensor in the same pixel array. These sensors have great potential for high-speed robotics and computer vision because they allow us to combine the benefits of conventional cameras with those of event-based sensors: low latency, high temporal resolution, and very high dynamic range. However, new algorithms are required to exploit the sensor characteristics and cope with its unconventional output, which consists of a stream of asynchronous brightnes…
When Every Millisecond Counts: Real-Time Anomaly Detection via the Multimodal Asynchronous Hybrid Network
National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University（多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室，计算机科学学院，北京大学）；Department of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University（软件与微电子系，北京大学）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University（电子与计算机工程学院，北京大学）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, SCSE, Beihang University（虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室，北航软件学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Baidu Inc（百度公司）
Asynchronous Event Stream Noise Filtering for High-frequency Structure Deformation Measurement
College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（航空航天科学与工程学院，国防科技大学）；Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation（图像测量与视觉导航省级重点实验室）
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that respond to per-pixel brightness changes in the form of asynchronous and sparse "events". Recently, pattern recognition algorithms, such as learning-based methods, have made significant progress with event cameras by converting events into synchronous dense, image-like representations and applying traditional machine learning methods developed for standard cameras. However, these approaches discard the spatial and temporal sparsity inherent in event data at the cost of higher computational complexity and latency. In this work, we present a general fra…
Event cameras output asynchronous events to represent intensity changes with a high temporal resolution, even under extreme lighting conditions. Currently, most of the existing works use a single contrast threshold to estimate the intensity change of all pixels. However, complex circuit bias and manufacturing imperfections cause biased pixels and mismatch contrast threshold among pixels, which may lead to undesirable outputs. In this paper, we propose a new event camera model and two calibration approaches which cover event-only cameras and hybrid image-event cameras. When intensity images are…
Event cameras sense intensity changes and have many advantages over conventional cameras. To take advantage of event cameras, some methods have been proposed to reconstruct intensity images from event streams. However, the outputs are still in low resolution (LR), noisy, and unrealistic. The low-quality outputs stem broader applications of event cameras, where high spatial resolution (HR) is needed as well as high temporal resolution, dynamic range, and no motion blur. We consider the problem of reconstructing and super-resolving intensity images from LR events, when no ground truth (GT) HR im…
Event cameras can capture pixel-level illumination changes with very high temporal resolution and dynamic range. They have received increasing research interest due to their robustness to lighting conditions and motion blur. Two main approaches exist in the literature to feed the event-based processing algorithms: packaging the triggered events in event packages and sending them one-by-one as single events. These approaches suffer limitations from either processing overflow or lack of responsivity. Processing overflow is caused by high event generation rates when the algorithm cannot process a…
Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学工业机器人与信息技术研究所）；Universidad UTE（UTE大学）
Event cameras are bioinspired sensors with reaction times in the order of microseconds. This property makes them appealing for use in highly-dynamic computer vision applications. In this work,we explore the limits of this sensing technology and present an ultra-fast tracking algorithm able to estimate six-degree-of-freedom motion with dynamics over 25.8 g, at a throughput of 10 kHz,processing over a million events per second. Our method is capable of tracking either camera motion or the motion of an object in front of it, using an error-state Kalman filter formulated in a Lie-theoretic sense. …
University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Samsung AI Centre Toronto（三星多伦多人工智能中心）
Event cameras are vision sensors that record asynchronous streams of per-pixel brightness changes, referred to as "events". They have appealing advantages over frame-based cameras for computer vision, including high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and no motion blur. Due to the sparse, non-uniform spatiotemporal layout of the event signal, pattern recognition algorithms typically aggregate events into a grid-based representation and subsequently process it by a standard vision pipeline, e.g., Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In this work, we introduce a general framework to convert…
University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Rimac Automobili（里马克汽车公司）
Event-based cameras are biologically inspired sensors that output events, i.e., asynchronous pixel-wise brightness changes in the scene. Their high dynamic range and temporal resolution of a microsecond makes them more reliable than standard cameras in environments of challenging illumination and in high-speed scenarios, thus developing odometry algorithms based solely on event cameras offers exciting new possibilities for autonomous systems and robots. In this paper, we propose a novel stereo visual odometry method for event cameras based on feature detection and matching with careful feature…
Event cameras are activity-driven bio-inspired vision sensors, thereby resulting in advantages such as sparsity,high temporal resolution, low latency, and power consumption. Given the different sensing modality of event camera and high quality of conventional vision paradigm, event processing is predominantly solved by transforming the sparse and asynchronous events into 2D grid and subsequently applying standard vision pipelines. Despite the promising results displayed by supervised learning approaches in 2D grid generation, these approaches treat the task in supervised manner. Labeled task s…
We present TrackNet, a method for Multi-Target Multi-Camera (MTMC) vehicle tracking from traffic video sequences. Cross-camera vehicle tracking has proved to be a challenging task due to perspective, scale and speed variance, as well occlusions and noise conditions. Our method is based on a modular approach that first detects vehicles frame-by-frame using Faster R-CNN, then tracks detections through single camera using Kalman filter, and finally matches tracks by a triplet metric learning strategy. We conduct experiments on TrackNet within the AI City Challenge framework, and present competiti…
