Learn to See by Events: Color Frame Synthesis from Event and RGB Cameras

Winner of the Best Paper Award

Abstract

Event cameras are biologically-inspired sensors that gather the temporal evolution of the scene. They capture pixel-wise brightness variations and output a corresponding stream of asynchronous events. Despite having multiple advantages with respect to traditional cameras, their use is partially prevented by the limited applicability of traditional data processing and vision algorithms. To this aim, we present a framework which exploits the output stream of event cameras to synthesize RGB frames, relying on an initial or a periodic set of color key-frames and the sequence of intermediate events. Differently from existing work, we propose a deep learning-based frame synthesis method, consisting of an adversarial architecture combined with a recurrent module. Qualitative results and quantitative per-pixel, perceptual, and semantic evaluation on four public datasets confirm the quality of the synthesized images.

Recommended citation

@inproceedings{pini2020learn,
  title={Learn to see by events: Color frame synthesis from event and RGB cameras},
  author={Pini, Stefano and Borghi, Guido and Vezzani, Roberto},
  booktitle={International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications},
  volume={4},
  pages={37--47},
  year={2020}
}