No Arabic abstract
Event cameras are activity-driven bio-inspired vision sensors, thereby resulting in advantages such as sparsity,high temporal resolution, low latency, and power consumption. Given the different sensing modality of event camera and high quality of conventional vision paradigm, event processing is predominantly solved by transforming the sparse and asynchronous events into 2D grid and subsequently applying standard vision pipelines. Despite the promising results displayed by supervised learning approaches in 2D grid generation, these approaches treat the task in supervised manner. Labeled task specific ground truth event data is challenging to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we propose Event-LSTM, an unsupervised Auto-Encoder architecture made up of LSTM layers as a promising alternative to learn 2D grid representation from event sequence. Compared to competing supervised approaches, ours is a task-agnostic approach ideally suited for the event domain, where task specific labeled data is scarce. We also tailor the proposed solution to exploit asynchronous nature of event stream, which gives it desirable charateristics such as speed invariant and energy-efficient 2D grid generation. Besides, we also push state-of-the-art event de-noising forward by introducing memory into the de-noising process. Evaluations on activity recognition and gesture recognition demonstrate that our approach yields improvement over state-of-the-art approaches, while providing the flexibilty to learn from unlabelled data.
Event-based cameras are dynamic vision sensors that can provide asynchronous measurements of changes in per-pixel brightness at a microsecond level. This makes them significantly faster than conventional frame-based cameras, and an appealing choice for high-speed navigation. While an interesting sensor modality, this asynchronous data poses a challenge for common machine learning techniques. In this paper, we present an event variational autoencoder for unsupervised representation learning from asynchronous event camera data. We show that it is feasible to learn compact representations from spatiotemporal event data to encode the context. Furthermore, we show that such pretrained representations can be beneficial for navigation, allowing for usage in reinforcement learning instead of end-to-end reward driven perception. We validate this framework of learning visuomotor policies by applying it to an obstacle avoidance scenario in simulation. We show that representations learnt from event data enable training fast control policies that can adapt to different control capacities, and demonstrate a higher degree of robustness than end-to-end learning from event images.
Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVSs) asynchronously stream events in correspondence of pixels subject to brightness changes. Differently from classic vision devices, they produce a sparse representation of the scene. Therefore, to apply standard computer vision algorithms, events need to be integrated into a frame or event-surface. This is usually attained through hand-crafted grids that reconstruct the frame using ad-hoc heuristics. In this paper, we propose Matrix-LSTM, a grid of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells that efficiently process events and learn end-to-end task-dependent event-surfaces. Compared to existing reconstruction approaches, our learned event-surface shows good flexibility and expressiveness on optical flow estimation on the MVSEC benchmark and it improves the state-of-the-art of event-based object classification on the N-Cars dataset.
Unlike conventional frame-based sensors, event-based visual sensors output information through spikes at a high temporal resolution. By only encoding changes in pixel intensity, they showcase a low-power consuming, low-latency approach to visual information sensing. To use this information for higher sensory tasks like object recognition and tracking, an essential simplification step is the extraction and learning of features. An ideal feature descriptor must be robust to changes involving (i) local transformations and (ii) re-appearances of a local event pattern. To that end, we propose a novel spatiotemporal feature representation learning algorithm based on slow feature analysis (SFA). Using SFA, smoothly changing linear projections are learnt which are robust to local visual transformations. In order to determine if the features can learn to be invariant to various visual transformations, feature point tracking tasks are used for evaluation. Extensive experiments across two datasets demonstrate the adaptability of the spatiotemporal feature learner to translation, scaling and rotational transformations of the feature points. More importantly, we find that the obtained feature representations are able to exploit the high temporal resolution of such event-based cameras in generating better feature tracks.
Despite their advantages in terms of computational resources, latency, and power consumption, event-based implementations of neural networks have not been able to achieve the same performance figures as their equivalent state-of-the-art deep network models. We propose counter neurons as minimal spiking neuron models which only require addition and comparison operations, thus avoiding costly multiplications. We show how inference carried out in deep counter networks converges to the same accuracy levels as are achieved with state-of-the-art conventional networks. As their event-based style of computation leads to reduced latency and sparse updates, counter networks are ideally suited for efficient compact and low-power hardware implementation. We present theory and training methods for counter networks, and demonstrate on the MNIST benchmark that counter networks converge quickly, both in terms of time and number of operations required, to state-of-the-art classification accuracy.
Event cameras, which are asynchronous bio-inspired vision sensors, have shown great potential in a variety of situations, such as fast motion and low illumination scenes. However, most of the event-based object tracking methods are designed for scenarios with untextured objects and uncluttered backgrounds. There are few event-based object tracking methods that support bounding box-based object tracking. The main idea behind this work is to propose an asynchronous Event-based Tracking-by-Detection (ETD) method for generic bounding box-based object tracking. To achieve this goal, we present an Adaptive Time-Surface with Linear Time Decay (ATSLTD) event-to-frame conversion algorithm, which asynchronously and effectively warps the spatio-temporal information of asynchronous retinal events to a sequence of ATSLTD frames with clear object contours. We feed the sequence of ATSLTD frames to the proposed ETD method to perform accurate and efficient object tracking, which leverages the high temporal resolution property of event cameras. We compare the proposed ETD method with seven popular object tracking methods, that are based on conventional cameras or event cameras, and two variants of ETD. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed ETD method in handling various challenging environments.