SEPose: A Synthetic Event-based Human Pose Estimation Dataset for Pedestrian Monitoring

Event-based sensors have emerged as a promising solution for addressing challenging conditions in pedestrian and traffic monitoring systems. Their low-latency and high dynamic range allow for improved response time in safety-critical situations caused by distracted walking or other unusual movements. However, the availability of data covering such scenarios remains limited. To address this gap, we present SEPose -- a comprehensive synthetic event-based human pose estimation dataset for fixed pedestrian perception generated using dynamic vision sensors in the CARLA simulator. With nearly 350K annotated pedestrians with body pose keypoints from the perspective of fixed traffic cameras, SEPose is a comprehensive synthetic multi-person pose estimation dataset that spans busy and light crowds and traffic across diverse lighting and weather conditions in 4-way intersections in urban, suburban, and rural environments. We train existing state-of-the-art models such as RVT and YOLOv8 on our dataset and evaluate them on real event-based data to demonstrate the sim-to-real generalization capabilities of the proposed dataset.

Event Quality Score (EQS): Assessing the Realism of Simulated Event Camera Streams via Distances in Latent Space

Event cameras promise a paradigm shift in vision sensing with their low latency, high dynamic range, and asynchronous nature of events. Unfortunately, the scarcity of high-quality labeled datasets hinders their widespread adoption in deep learning-driven computer vision. To mitigate this, several simulators have been proposed to generate synthetic event data for training models for detection and estimation tasks. However, the fundamentally different sensor design of event cameras compared to traditional frame-based cameras poses a challenge for accurate simulation. As a result, most simulated data fail to mimic data captured by real event cameras. Inspired by existing work on using deep features for image comparison, we introduce event quality score (EQS), a quality metric that utilizes activations of the RVT architecture. Through sim-to-real experiments on the DSEC driving dataset, it is shown that a higher EQS implies improved generalization to real-world data after training on simulated events. Thus, optimizing for EQS can lead to developing more realistic event camera simulators, effectively reducing the simulation gap. EQS is available at https://github.com/eventbasedvision/EQS.