Event-based Vision: A Survey

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution (in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision (feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision (reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient, bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

HW-Flow: A Multi-Abstraction Level HW-CNN Codesign Pruning Methodology

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have produced unprecedented accuracy for many computer vision problems in the recent past. In power and compute-constrained embedded platforms, deploying modern CNNs can present many challenges. Most CNN architectures do not run in real-time due to the high number of computational operations involved during the inference phase. This emphasizes the role of CNN optimization techniques in early design space exploration. To estimate their efficacy in satisfying the target constraints, existing techniques are either hardware (HW) agnostic, pseudo-HW-aware by considering parameter and operation counts, or HW-aware through inflexible hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) setups. In this work, we introduce HW-Flow, a framework for optimizing and exploring CNN models based on three levels of hardware abstraction: Coarse, Mid and Fine. Through these levels, CNN design and optimization can be iteratively refined towards efficient execution on the target hardware platform. We present HW-Flow in the context of CNN pruning by augmenting a reinforcement learning agent with key metrics to understand the influence of its pruning actions on the inference hardware. With 2× reduction in energy and latency, we prune ResNet56, ResNet50, and DeepLabv3 with minimal accuracy degradation on the CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CityScapes datasets, respectively

Engineering data compendium. Human perception and performance. User's guide

The concept underlying the Engineering Data Compendium was the product of a research and development program (Integrated Perceptual Information for Designers project) aimed at facilitating the application of basic research findings in human performance to the design and military crew systems. The principal objective was to develop a workable strategy for: (1) identifying and distilling information of potential value to system design from the existing research literature, and (2) presenting this technical information in a way that would aid its accessibility, interpretability, and applicability by systems designers. The present four volumes of the Engineering Data Compendium represent the first implementation of this strategy. This is the first volume, the User's Guide, containing a description of the program and instructions for its use