Fast Event-based Corner Detection

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 lat- est event at each pixel) using only comparison operations. Our method asynchronously processes event by event with very low latency. Our implementation is capable of pro- cessing 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.