E-Calib: A Fast, Robust and Accurate Calibration Toolbox for Event Cameras

Event cameras triggered a paradigm shift in the computer vision community delineated by their asynchronous nature, low latency, and high dynamic range. Calibration of event cameras is always essential to account for the sensor intrinsic parameters and for 3D perception. However, conventional image-based calibration techniques are not applicable due to the asynchronous, binary output of the sensor. The current standard for calibrating event cameras relies on either blinking patterns or event-based image reconstruction algorithms. These approaches are difficult to deploy in factory settings and are affected by noise and artifacts degrading the calibration performance. To bridge these limitations, we present E-Calib, a novel, fast, robust, and accurate calibration toolbox for event cameras utilizing the asymmetric circle grid, for its robustness to out-of-focus scenes. The proposed method is tested in a variety of rigorous experiments for different event camera models, on circle grids with different geometric properties, and under challenging illumination conditions. The results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in detection success rate, reprojection error, and estimation accuracy of extrinsic parameters.

High Speed Neuromorphic Vision-Based Inspection of Countersinks in Automated Manufacturing Processes

Countersink inspection is crucial in various automated assembly lines, especially in the aerospace and automotive sectors. Advancements in machine vision introduced automated robotic inspection of countersinks using laser scanners and monocular cameras. Nevertheless, the aforementioned sensing pipelines require the robot to pause on each hole for inspection due to high latency and measurement uncertainties with motion, leading to prolonged execution times of the inspection task. The neuromorphic vision sensor, on the other hand, has the potential to expedite the countersink inspection process, but the unorthodox output of the neuromorphic technology prohibits utilizing traditional image processing techniques. Therefore, novel event-based perception algorithms need to be introduced. We propose a countersink detection approach on the basis of event-based motion compensation and the mean-shift clustering principle. In addition, our framework presents a robust event-based circle detection algorithm to precisely estimate the depth of the countersink specimens. The proposed approach expedites the inspection process by a factor of 10$\times$ compared to conventional countersink inspection methods. The work in this paper was validated for over 50 trials on three countersink workpiece variants. The experimental results show that our method provides a precision of 0.025 mm for countersink depth inspection despite the low resolution of commercially available neuromorphic cameras.

A Neuromorphic Vision-Based Measurement for Robust Relative Localization in Future Space Exploration Missions

Space exploration has witnessed revolutionary changes upon landing of the Perseverance Rover on the Martian surface and demonstrating the first flight beyond Earth by the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. During their mission on Mars, Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity collaboratively explore the Martian surface, where Ingenuity scouts terrain information for rover's safe traversability. Hence, determining the relative poses between both the platforms is of paramount importance for the success of this mission. Driven by this necessity, this work proposes a robust relative localization system based on a fusion of neuromorphic vision-based measurements (NVBMs) and inertial measurements. The emergence of neuromorphic vision triggered a paradigm shift in the computer vision community, due to its unique working principle delineated with asynchronous events triggered by variations of light intensities occurring in the scene. This implies that observations cannot be acquired in static scenes due to illumination invariance. To circumvent this limitation, high frequency active landmarks are inserted in the scene to guarantee consistent event firing. These landmarks are adopted as salient features to facilitate relative localization. A novel event-based landmark identification algorithm using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) is developed for matching the landmarks correspondences formulating our NVBMs. The NVBMs are fused with inertial measurements in proposed state estimators, landmark tracking Kalman filter (LTKF) and translation decoupled Kalman filter (TDKF) for landmark tracking and relative localization, respectively. The proposed system was tested in a variety of experiments and has outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and range.