Fast event-based corner detection

Abstract

Event cameras offer many advantages over standard frame-based cameras, such as low latency, high temporal resolution, and a high dynamic range. They respond to pixel-level brightness changes and, therefore, provide a sparse output. However, in textured scenes with rapid motion, millions of events are generated per second. Therefore, state-of-the-art event-based algorithms either require massive parallel computation (e.g., a GPU) or depart from the event-based processing paradigm. Inspired by frame-based pre-processing techniques that reduce an image to a set of features, which are typically the input to higher-level algorithms, we propose a method to reduce an event stream to a corner event stream. Our goal is twofold: extract relevant tracking information (corners do not suffer from the aperture problem) and decrease the event rate for later processing stages. Our event-based corner detector is very efficient due to its design principle, which consists of working on the Surface of Active Events (a map with the timestamp of the latest event at each pixel) using only comparison operations. Our method asynchronously processes event by event with very low latency. Our implementation is capable of processing millions of events per second on a single core (less than a micro-second per event) and reduces the event rate by a factor of 10 to 20.