Real-time Noise Source Estimation of a Camera System from an Image and Metadata

Autonomous machines must self-maintain proper functionality to ensure the safety of humans and themselves. This pertains particularly to its cameras as predominant sensors to perceive the environment and support actions. A fundamental camera problem addressed in this study is noise. Solutions often focus on denoising images a posteriori, that is, fighting symptoms rather than root causes. However, tackling root causes requires identifying the noise sources, considering the limitations of mobile platforms. This work investigates a real-time, memory-efficient and reliable noise source estimator that combines data- and physically-based models. To this end, a DNN that examines an image with camera metadata for major camera noise sources is built and trained. In addition, it quantifies unexpected factors that impact image noise or metadata. This study investigates seven different estimators on six datasets that include synthetic noise, real-world noise from two camera systems, and real field campaigns. For these, only the model with most metadata is capable to accurately and robustly quantify all individual noise contributions. This method outperforms total image noise estimators and can be plug-and-play deployed. It also serves as a basis to include more advanced noise sources, or as part of an automatic countermeasure feedback-loop to approach fully reliable machines.

CMax-SLAM: Event-based Rotational-Motion Bundle Adjustment and SLAM System using Contrast Maximization

Event cameras are bio-inspired visual sensors that capture pixel-wise intensity changes and output asynchronous event streams. They show great potential over conventional cameras to handle challenging scenarios in robotics and computer vision, such as high-speed and high dynamic range. This paper considers the problem of rotational motion estimation using event cameras. Several event-based rotation estimation methods have been developed in the past decade, but their performance has not been evaluated and compared under unified criteria yet. In addition, these prior works do not consider a global refinement step. To this end, we conduct a systematic study of this problem with two objectives in mind: summarizing previous works and presenting our own solution. First, we compare prior works both theoretically and experimentally. Second, we propose the first event-based rotation-only bundle adjustment (BA) approach. We formulate it leveraging the state-of-the-art Contrast Maximization (CMax) framework, which is principled and avoids the need to convert events into frames. Third, we use the proposed BA to build CMax-SLAM, the first event-based rotation-only SLAM system comprising a front-end and a back-end. Our BA is able to run both offline (trajectory smoothing) and online (CMax-SLAM back-end). To demonstrate the performance and versatility of our method, we present comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including indoor, outdoor and space scenarios. We discuss the pitfalls of real-world evaluation and propose a proxy for the reprojection error as the figure of merit to evaluate event-based rotation BA methods. We release the source code and novel data sequences to benefit the community. We hope this work leads to a better understanding and fosters further research on event-based ego-motion estimation. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/cmax_slam

Low-power, Continuous Remote Behavioral Localization with Event Cameras

Researchers in natural science need reliable methods for quantifying animal behavior. Recently, numerous computer vision methods emerged to automate the process. However, observing wild species at remote locations remains a challenging task due to difficult lighting conditions and constraints on power supply and data storage. Event cameras offer unique advantages for battery-dependent remote monitoring due to their low power consumption and high dynamic range capabilities. We use this novel sensor to quantify a behavior in Chinstrap penguins called ecstatic display. We formulate the problem as a temporal action detection task, determining the start and end times of the behavior. For this purpose, we recorded a colony of breeding penguins in Antarctica during several weeks and labeled event data on 16 nests. The developed method consists of a generator of candidate time intervals (proposals) and a classifier of the actions within them. The experiments show that the event cameras' natural response to motion is effective for continuous behavior monitoring and detection, reaching a mean average precision (mAP) of 58% (which increases to 63% in good weather conditions). The results also demonstrate the robustness against various lighting conditions contained in the challenging dataset. The low-power capabilities of the event camera allows to record three times longer than with a conventional camera. This work pioneers the use of event cameras for remote wildlife observation, opening new interdisciplinary opportunities. https://tub-rip.github.io/eventpenguins/

Event-based Continuous Color Video Decompression from Single Frames

We present ContinuityCam, a novel approach to generate a continuous video from a single static RGB image, using an event camera. Conventional cameras struggle with high-speed motion capture due to bandwidth and dynamic range limitations. Event cameras are ideal sensors to solve this problem because they encode compressed change information at high temporal resolution. In this work, we propose a novel task called event-based continuous color video decompression, pairing single static color frames and events to reconstruct temporally continuous videos. Our approach combines continuous long-range motion modeling with a feature-plane-based synthesis neural integration model, enabling frame prediction at arbitrary times within the events. Our method does not rely on additional frames except for the initial image, increasing, thus, the robustness to sudden light changes, minimizing the prediction latency, and decreasing the bandwidth requirement. We introduce a novel single objective beamsplitter setup that acquires aligned images and events and a novel and challenging Event Extreme Decompression Dataset (E2D2) that tests the method in various lighting and motion profiles. We thoroughly evaluate our method through benchmarking reconstruction as well as various downstream tasks. Our approach significantly outperforms the event- and image- based baselines in the proposed task.

Event-based Background-Oriented Schlieren

Schlieren imaging is an optical technique to observe the flow of transparent media, such as air or water, without any particle seeding. However, conventional frame-based techniques require both high spatial and temporal resolution cameras, which impose bright illumination and expensive computation limitations. Event cameras offer potential advantages (high dynamic range, high temporal resolution, and data efficiency) to overcome such limitations due to their bio-inspired sensing principle. This paper presents a novel technique for perceiving air convection using events and frames by providing the first theoretical analysis that connects event data and schlieren. We formulate the problem as a variational optimization one combining the linearized event generation model with a physically-motivated parameterization that estimates the temporal derivative of the air density. The experiments with accurately aligned frame- and event camera data reveal that the proposed method enables event cameras to obtain on par results with existing frame-based optical flow techniques. Moreover, the proposed method works under dark conditions where frame-based schlieren fails, and also enables slow-motion analysis by leveraging the event camera's advantages. Our work pioneers and opens a new stack of event camera applications, as we publish the source code as well as the first schlieren dataset with high-quality frame and event data. https://github.com/tub-rip/event_based_bos

Fast Event-based Optical Flow Estimation by Triplet Matching

Event cameras are novel bio-inspired sensors that offer advantages over traditional cameras (low latency, high dynamic range, low power, etc.). Optical flow estimation methods that work on packets of events trade off speed for accuracy, while event-by-event (incremental) methods have strong assumptions and have not been tested on common benchmarks that quantify progress in the field. Towards applications on resource-constrained devices, it is important to develop optical flow algorithms that are fast, light-weight and accurate. This work leverages insights from neuroscience, and proposes a novel optical flow estimation scheme based on triplet matching. The experiments on publicly available benchmarks demonstrate its capability to handle complex scenes with comparable results as prior packet-based algorithms. In addition, the proposed method achieves the fastest execution time (> 10 kHz) on standard CPUs as it requires only three events in estimation. We hope that our research opens the door to real-time, incremental motion estimation methods and applications in real-world scenarios.

A Fast Geometric Regularizer to Mitigate Event Collapse in the Contrast Maximization Framework

Event cameras are emerging vision sensors and their advantages are suitable for various applications such as autonomous robots. Contrast maximization (CMax), which provides state-of-the-art accuracy on motion estimation using events, may suffer from an overfitting problem called event collapse. Prior works are computationally expensive or cannot alleviate the overfitting, which undermines the benefits of the CMax framework. We propose a novel, computationally efficient regularizer based on geometric principles to mitigate event collapse. The experiments show that the proposed regularizer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy results, while its reduced computational complexity makes it two to four times faster than previous approaches. To the best of our knowledge, our regularizer is the only effective solution for event collapse without trading off runtime. We hope our work opens the door for future applications that unlocks the advantages of event cameras.

Event-based Stereo Depth Estimation from Ego-motion using Ray Density Fusion

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that mimic the human retina by responding to brightness changes in the scene. They generate asynchronous spike-based outputs at microsecond resolution, providing advantages over traditional cameras like high dynamic range, low motion blur and power efficiency. Most event-based stereo methods attempt to exploit the high temporal resolution of the camera and the simultaneity of events across cameras to establish matches and estimate depth. By contrast, this work investigates how to estimate depth from stereo event cameras without explicit data association by fusing back-projected ray densities, and demonstrates its effectiveness on head-mounted camera data, which is recorded in an egocentric fashion. Code and video are available at https://github.com/tub-rip/dvs_mcemvs

Secrets of Event-Based Optical Flow

Event cameras respond to scene dynamics and offer advantages to estimate motion. Following recent image-based deep-learning achievements, optical flow estimation methods for event cameras have rushed to combine those image-based methods with event data. However, it requires several adaptations (data conversion, loss function, etc.) as they have very different properties. We develop a principled method to extend the Contrast Maximization framework to estimate optical flow from events alone. We investigate key elements: how to design the objective function to prevent overfitting, how to warp events to deal better with occlusions, and how to improve convergence with multi-scale raw events. With these key elements, our method ranks first among unsupervised methods on the MVSEC benchmark, and is competitive on the DSEC benchmark. Moreover, our method allows us to expose the issues of the ground truth flow in those benchmarks, and produces remarkable results when it is transferred to unsupervised learning settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/tub-rip/event_based_optical_flow

Multi-Event-Camera Depth Estimation and Outlier Rejection by Refocused Events Fusion

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that offer advantages over traditional cameras. They work asynchronously, sampling the scene with microsecond resolution and producing a stream of brightness changes. This unconventional output has sparked novel computer vision methods to unlock the camera's potential. We tackle the problem of event-based stereo 3D reconstruction for SLAM. Most event-based stereo methods try to exploit the camera's high temporal resolution and event simultaneity across cameras to establish matches and estimate depth. By contrast, we investigate how to estimate depth without explicit data association by fusing Disparity Space Images (DSIs) originated in efficient monocular methods. We develop fusion theory and apply it to design multi-camera 3D reconstruction algorithms that produce state-of-the-art results, as we confirm by comparing against four baseline methods and testing on a variety of available datasets.