EA: An Event Autoencoder for High-Speed Vision Sensing

High-speed vision sensing is essential for real-time perception in applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and industrial automation. Traditional frame-based vision systems suffer from motion blur, high latency, and redundant data processing, limiting their performance in dynamic environments. Event cameras, which capture asynchronous brightness changes at the pixel level, offer a promising alternative but pose challenges in object detection due to sparse and noisy event streams. To address this, we propose an event autoencoder architecture that efficiently compresses and reconstructs event data while preserving critical spatial and temporal features. The proposed model employs convolutional encoding and incorporates adaptive threshold selection and a lightweight classifier to enhance recognition accuracy while reducing computational complexity. Experimental results on the existing Smart Event Face Dataset (SEFD) demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable accuracy to the YOLO-v4 model while utilizing up to $35.5\times$ fewer parameters. Implementations on embedded platforms, including Raspberry Pi 4B and NVIDIA Jetson Nano, show high frame rates ranging from 8 FPS up to 44.8 FPS. The proposed classifier exhibits up to 87.84x better FPS than the state-of-the-art and significantly improves event-based vision performance, making it ideal for low-power, high-speed applications in real-time edge computing.

Descriptor: Face Detection Dataset for Programmable Threshold-Based Sparse-Vision

Smart focal-plane and in-chip image processing has emerged as a crucial technology for vision-enabled embedded systems with energy efficiency and privacy. However, the lack of special datasets providing examples of the data that these neuromorphic sensors compute to convey visual information has hindered the adoption of these promising technologies. Neuromorphic imager variants, including event-based sensors, produce various representations such as streams of pixel addresses representing time and locations of intensity changes in the focal plane, temporal-difference data, data sifted/thresholded by temporal differences, image data after applying spatial transformations, optical flow data, and/or statistical representations. To address the critical barrier to entry, we provide an annotated, temporal-threshold-based vision dataset specifically designed for face detection tasks derived from the same videos used for Aff-Wild2. By offering multiple threshold levels (e.g., 4, 8, 12, and 16), this dataset allows for comprehensive evaluation and optimization of state-of-the-art neural architectures under varying conditions and settings compared to traditional methods. The accompanying tool flow for generating event data from raw videos further enhances accessibility and usability. We anticipate that this resource will significantly support the development of robust vision systems based on smart sensors that can process based on temporal-difference thresholds, enabling more accurate and efficient object detection and localization and ultimately promoting the broader adoption of low-power, neuromorphic imaging technologies. To support further research, we publicly released the dataset at \url{https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/bw2e-dj78}.