Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2309.01159

An Asynchronous Linear Filter Architecture for Hybrid Event-Frame Cameras

Abstract

Event cameras are ideally suited to capture High Dynamic Range (HDR) visual information without blur but provide poor imaging capability for static or slowly varying scenes. Conversely, conventional image sensors measure absolute intensity of slowly changing scenes effectively but do poorly on HDR or quickly changing scenes. In this paper, we present an asynchronous linear filter architecture, fusing event and frame camera data, for HDR video reconstruction and spatial convolution that exploits the advantages of both sensor modalities. The key idea is the introduction of a state that directly encodes the integrated or convolved image information and that is updated asynchronously as each event or each frame arrives from the camera. The state can be read-off as-often-as and whenever required to feed into subsequent vision modules for real-time robotic systems. Our experimental results are evaluated on both publicly available datasets with challenging lighting conditions and fast motions, along with a new dataset with HDR reference that we provide. The proposed AKF pipeline outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both absolute intensity error (69.4% reduction) and image similarity indexes (average 35.5% improvement). We also demonstrate the integration of image convolution with linear spatial kernels Gaussian, Sobel, and Laplacian as an application of our architecture.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ziwei Wang, Yonhon Ng, Cedric Scheerlinck, Robert Mahony. 2024-08-30. An Asynchronous Linear Filter Architecture for Hybrid Event-Frame Cameras. https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2023.3311534

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

SAMReg: SAM-enabled Image Registration with ROI-based Correspondence

This paper describes a new spatial correspondence representation based on paired regions-of-interest (ROIs), for medical image registration. The distinct properties of the proposed ROI-based correspondence are discussed, in the context of potential benefits in clinical applications following image registration, compared with alternative correspondence-representing approaches, such as those based on sampled displacements and spatial transformation functions. These benefits include a clear connection between learning-based image registration and segmentation, which in turn motivates two cases of image registration approaches using (pre-)trained segmentation networks. Based on the segment anything model (SAM), a vision foundation model for segmentation, we develop a new registration algorithm SAMReg, which does not require any training (or training data), gradient-based fine-tuning or prompt engineering. The proposed SAMReg models are evaluated across five real-world applications, including intra-subject registration tasks with cardiac MR and lung CT, challenging inter-subject registration scenarios with prostate MR and retinal imaging, and an additional evaluation with a non-clinical example with aerial image registration. The proposed methods outperform both intensity-based iterative algorithms and DDF-predicting learning-based networks across tested metrics including Dice and target registration errors on anatomical structures, and further demonstrates competitive performance compared to weakly-supervised registration approaches that rely on fully-segmented training data. Open source code and examples are available at: https://github.com/sqhuang0103/SAMReg.git.

cs.CV

Q-SiT: Teaching LMMs for Image Quality Scoring and Interpreting

Image quality scoring and interpreting are two fundamental components of Image Quality Assessment (IQA). The former quantifies image quality, while the latter enables descriptive question answering about image quality. Traditionally, these two tasks have been addressed independently. However, image-quality-specific psychophysical studies suggest that these two tasks are conceptually interconnected: interpreting explicitly represents perceived quality attributes whereas scoring summarizes such evidence into an overall quality judgment. Thus, unifying these capabilities within a single model is both intuitive and logically coherent. In this paper, we propose Q-SiT (Quality Scoring and Interpreting joint Teaching), a unified framework that enables large multimodal models (LMMs) to learn both image quality scoring and interpreting simultaneously. We achieve this by transforming conventional IQA datasets into learnable question-answering datasets and incorporating human-annotated quality interpreting data for training. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient scoring \& interpreting balance strategy, which first determines the optimal data mix ratio on lightweight LMMs and then maps this ratio to primary LMMs for fine-tuning adjustment. This strategy not only mitigates task interference and enhances cross-task knowledge transfer but also significantly reduces computational costs compared to direct optimization on full-scale LMMs. With this joint learning framework and corresponding training strategy, we develop Q-SiT, the first model capable of simultaneously performing image quality scoring and interpreting tasks, along with its lightweight variant, Q-SiT-mini. Experimental results demonstrate that Q-SiT achieves strong performance in both tasks with superior generalization IQA abilities, while Q-SiT-mini significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining competitive performance.

cs.CV

Preserving Guidance in Cost-Volume Retrieval under Extreme LiDAR Sparsity in Iterative Stereo

While accurate LiDAR depth has been shown to improve stereo matching, high-end LiDAR remains costly and difficult to deploy at scale, motivating guidance from sparse LiDAR measurements. In this paper, we revisit how extremely sparse LiDAR can guide iterative stereo by examining its cost-volume retrieval mechanism. Our analysis shows that LiDAR guidance degrades sharply when only a few hundred points are available, and we provide a signal-processing explanation for why iterative stereo fails to fully exploit such sparse input. This insight leads to a simple yet highly effective remedy: pre-filling the initial disparity map so that cost-volume retrieval becomes more reliable under extremely sparse LiDAR. We find that pre-filling is also effective when injecting LiDAR depth into image features via early fusion, but for a fundamentally different reason, necessitating a distinct pre-filling approach. Combining both forms of guidance, our proposed Guided RAFT-Stereo (GRAFT-Stereo) achieves substantial improvements over existing LiDAR-guided stereo methods across multiple datasets.

cs.CV