EBSnoR: Event-Based Snow Removal by Optimal Dwell Time Thresholding

We propose an Event-Based Snow Removal algorithm called EBSnoR. We developed a technique to measure the dwell time of snowflakes on a pixel using event-based camera data, which is used to carry out a statistically optimal dwell time thresholding to partition event stream into snowflake and background events. The effectiveness of the proposed EBSnoR was verified qualitatively on a new dataset called UDayton25EBSnow comprised of front-facing event-based camera in a car driving through snow with manually annotated bounding boxes around surrounding vehicles, as well as a quantitatively using new snowflake event simulator called EBSnoGen. Qualitatively, EBSnoR correctly identifies events corresponding to snowflakes; and quantitatively, EBSnoR showed accuracy of 96.19%. Additional experiments showed that snow removal improved event-based object detection performance.