Unsupervised Motion Segmentation for Neuromorphic Aerial Surveillance

Achieving optimal performance with frame-based vision sensors on aerial platforms poses a significant challenge due to the fundamental tradeoffs between bandwidth and latency. Event cameras, which draw inspiration from biological vision systems, present a promising alternative due to their exceptional temporal resolution, superior dynamic range, and minimal power requirements. Due to these properties, they are well-suited for processing and segmenting fast motions that require rapid reactions. However, previous methods for event-based motion segmentation encountered limitations, such as the need for per-scene parameter tuning or manual labelling to achieve satisfactory results. To overcome these issues, our proposed method leverages features from self-supervised transformers on both event data and optical flow information, eliminating the need for human annotations and reducing the parameter tuning problem. In this paper, we use an event camera with HD resolution onboard a highly dynamic aerial platform in an urban setting. We conduct extensive evaluations of our framework across multiple datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance compared to existing works. Our method can effectively handle various types of motion and an arbitrary number of moving objects. Code and dataset are available at: \url{https://samiarja.github.io/evairborne/}