Cross-Modal Semi-Dense 6-DoF Tracking of an Event Camera in Challenging Conditions

Vision-based localization is a cost-effective and thus attractive solution for many intelligent mobile platforms. However, its accuracy and especially robustness still suffer from low illumination conditions, illumination changes, and aggressive motion. Event-based cameras are bio-inspired visual sensors that perform well in HDR conditions and have high temporal resolution, and thus provide an interesting alternative in such challenging scenarios. While purely event-based solutions currently do not yet produce satisfying mapping results, the present work demonstrates the feasibility of purely event-based tracking if an alternative sensor is permitted for mapping. The method relies on geometric 3D-2D registration of semi-dense maps and events, and achieves highly reliable and accurate cross-modal tracking results. Practically relevant scenarios are given by depth camera-supported tracking or map-based localization with a semi-dense map prior created by a regular image-based visual SLAM or structure-from-motion system. Conventional edge-based 3D-2D alignment is extended by a novel polarity-aware registration that makes use of signed time-surface maps (STSM) obtained from event streams. We furthermore introduce a novel culling strategy for occluded points. Both modifications increase the speed of the tracker and its robustness against occlusions or large view-point variations. The approach is validated on many real datasets covering the above-mentioned challenging conditions, and compared against similar solutions realised with regular cameras.

DEVO: Depth-Event Camera Visual Odometry in Challenging Conditions

We present a novel real-time visual odometry framework for a stereo setup of a depth and high-resolution event camera. Our framework balances accuracy and robustness against computational efficiency towards strong performance in challenging scenarios. We extend conventional edge-based semi-dense visual odometry towards time-surface maps obtained from event streams. Semi-dense depth maps are generated by warping the corresponding depth values of the extrinsically calibrated depth camera. The tracking module updates the camera pose through efficient, geometric semi-dense 3D-2D edge alignment. Our approach is validated on both public and self-collected datasets captured under various conditions. We show that the proposed method performs comparable to state-of-the-art RGB-D camera-based alternatives in regular conditions, and eventually outperforms in challenging conditions such as high dynamics or low illumination.