Efficient Evaluation of the Probability Density Function of a Wrapped Normal Distribution

The wrapped normal distribution arises when a the density of a one-dimensional normal distribution is wrapped around the circle infinitely many times. At first look, evaluation of its probability density function appears tedious as an infinite series is involved. In this paper, we investigate the evaluation of two truncated series representations. As one representation performs well for small uncertainties whereas the other performs well for large uncertainties, we show that in all cases a small number of summands is sufficient to achieve high accuracy

Recursive Estimation of Orientation Based on the Bingham Distribution

Directional estimation is a common problem in many tracking applications. Traditional filters such as the Kalman filter perform poorly because they fail to take the periodic nature of the problem into account. We present a recursive filter for directional data based on the Bingham distribution in two dimensions. The proposed filter can be applied to circular filtering problems with 180 degree symmetry, i.e., rotations by 180 degrees cannot be distinguished. It is easily implemented using standard numerical techniques and suitable for real-time applications. The presented approach is extensible to quaternions, which allow tracking arbitrary three-dimensional orientations. We evaluate our filter in a challenging scenario and compare it to a traditional Kalman filtering approach

Unscented Orientation Estimation Based on the Bingham Distribution

Orientation estimation for 3D objects is a common problem that is usually tackled with traditional nonlinear filtering techniques such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF) or the unscented Kalman filter (UKF). Most of these techniques assume Gaussian distributions to account for system noise and uncertain measurements. This distributional assumption does not consider the periodic nature of pose and orientation uncertainty. We propose a filter that considers the periodicity of the orientation estimation problem in its distributional assumption. This is achieved by making use of the Bingham distribution, which is defined on the hypersphere and thus inherently more suitable to periodic problems. Furthermore, handling of non-trivial system functions is done using deterministic sampling in an efficient way. A deterministic sampling scheme reminiscent of the UKF is proposed for the nonlinear manifold of orientations. It is the first deterministic sampling scheme that truly reflects the nonlinear manifold of the orientation

EventCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Event-based Object Recognition

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot classification heavily rely on the success of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. Due to a shortage of large-scale datasets, training such models for event camera data remains infeasible. Thus, adapting existing models across modalities is an important research challenge. In this work, we introduce EventCLIP, a novel approach that utilizes CLIP for zero-shot and few-shot event-based object recognition. We first generalize CLIP's image encoder to event data by converting raw events to 2D grid-based representations. To further enhance performance, we propose a feature adapter to aggregate temporal information over event frames and refine text embeddings to better align with the visual inputs. We evaluate EventCLIP on N-Caltech, N-Cars, and N-ImageNet datasets, achieving state-of-the-art few-shot performance. When fine-tuned on the entire dataset, our method outperforms all existing event classifiers. Moreover, we explore practical applications of EventCLIP including robust event classification and label-free event recognition, where our approach surpasses previous baselines designed specifically for these tasks.Comment: Better few-shot accuracy. Add results on 1) model fine-tuning 2) compare with concurrent works 3) learning from unlabeled data (unsupervised & semi-supervised

Deterministic Sampling for Nonlinear Dynamic State Estimation

The goal of this work is improving existing and suggesting novel filtering algorithms for nonlinear dynamic state estimation. Nonlinearity is considered in two ways: First, propagation is improved by proposing novel methods for approximating continuous probability distributions by discrete distributions defined on the same continuous domain. Second, nonlinear underlying domains are considered by proposing novel filters that inherently take the underlying geometry of these domains into account

Visual-inertial self-calibration on informative motion segments

Environmental conditions and external effects, such as shocks, have a significant impact on the calibration parameters of visual-inertial sensor systems. Thus long-term operation of these systems cannot fully rely on factory calibration. Since the observability of certain parameters is highly dependent on the motion of the device, using short data segments at device initialization may yield poor results. When such systems are additionally subject to energy constraints, it is also infeasible to use full-batch approaches on a big dataset and careful selection of the data is of high importance. In this paper, we present a novel approach for resource efficient self-calibration of visual-inertial sensor systems. This is achieved by casting the calibration as a segment-based optimization problem that can be run on a small subset of informative segments. Consequently, the computational burden is limited as only a predefined number of segments is used. We also propose an efficient information-theoretic selection to identify such informative motion segments. In evaluations on a challenging dataset, we show our approach to significantly outperform state-of-the-art in terms of computational burden while maintaining a comparable accuracy