Learning to Super Resolve Intensity Images from Events

An event camera detects per-pixel intensity difference and produces asynchronous event stream with low latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. As a trade-off, the event camera has low spatial resolution. We propose an end-to-end network to reconstruct high resolution, high dynamic range (HDR) images directly from the event stream. We evaluate our algorithm on both simulated and real-world sequences and verify that it captures fine details of a scene and outperforms the combination of the state-of-the-art event to image algorithms with the state-of-the-art super resolution schemes in many quantitative measures by large margins. We further extend our method by using the active sensor pixel (APS) frames or reconstructing images iteratively.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2020 as an oral presentatio

Lossy Event Compression based on Image-derived Quad Trees and Poisson Disk Sampling

With several advantages over conventional RGB cameras, event cameras have provided new opportunities for tackling visual tasks under challenging scenarios with fast motion, high dynamic range, and/or power constraint. Yet unlike image/video compression, the performance of event compression algorithm is far from satisfying and practical. The main challenge for compressing events is the unique event data form, i.e., a stream of asynchronously fired event tuples each encoding the 2D spatial location, timestamp, and polarity (denoting an increase or decrease in brightness). Since events only encode temporal variations, they lack spatial structure which is crucial for compression. To address this problem, we propose a novel event compression algorithm based on a quad tree (QT) segmentation map derived from the adjacent intensity images. The QT informs 2D spatial priority within the 3D space-time volume. In the event encoding step, events are first aggregated over time to form polarity-based event histograms. The histograms are then variably sampled via Poisson Disk Sampling prioritized by the QT based segmentation map. Next, differential encoding and run length encoding are employed for encoding the spatial and polarity information of the sampled events, respectively, followed by Huffman encoding to produce the final encoded events. Our Poisson Disk Sampling based Lossy Event Compression (PDS-LEC) algorithm performs rate-distortion based optimal allocation. On average, our algorithm achieves greater than 6x compression compared to the state of the art.Comment: 8 main page

Event Enhanced High-Quality Image Recovery

With extremely high temporal resolution, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision. However, their asynchronous imaging mechanism often aggravates the measurement sensitivity to noises and brings a physical burden to increase the image spatial resolution. To recover high-quality intensity images, one should address both denoising and super-resolution problems for event cameras. Since events depict brightness changes, with the enhanced degeneration model by the events, the clear and sharp high-resolution latent images can be recovered from the noisy, blurry and low-resolution intensity observations. Exploiting the framework of sparse learning, the events and the low-resolution intensity observations can be jointly considered. Based on this, we propose an explainable network, an event-enhanced sparse learning network (eSL-Net), to recover the high-quality images from event cameras. After training with a synthetic dataset, the proposed eSL-Net can largely improve the performance of the state-of-the-art by 7-12 dB. Furthermore, without additional training process, the proposed eSL-Net can be easily extended to generate continuous frames with frame-rate as high as the events