Nicolas Cuperlier

Biswadeep Sen, Benoit R. Cottereau, Nicolas Cuperlier et al.

Event-based cameras capture visual information as asynchronous streams of per-pixel brightness changes, generating sparse, temporally precise data. Compared to conventional frame-based sensors, they offer significant advantages in capturing high-speed dynamics while consuming substantially less power. Predicting future event representations from past observations is an important problem, enabling downstream tasks such as future semantic segmentation or object tracking without requiring access to future sensor measurements. While recent state-of-the-art approaches achieve strong performance, they often rely on computationally heavy backbones and, in some cases, large-scale pretraining, limiting their applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we introduce E-TIDE, a lightweight, end-to-end trainable architecture for event-tensor prediction that is designed to operate efficiently without large-scale pretraining. Our approach employs the TIDE module (Temporal Interaction for Dynamic Events), motivated by efficient spatiotemporal interaction design for sparse event tensors, to capture temporal dependencies via large-kernel mixing and activity-aware gating while maintaining low computational complexity. Experiments on standard event-based datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with significantly reduced model size and training requirements, making it well-suited for real-time deployment under tight latency and memory budgets.

Geoffroy Keime, Nicolas Cuperlier, Benoit R. Cottereau

Reliable visual place recognition (VPR) under dynamic real-world conditions is critical for autonomous robots, yet conventional deep networks remain limited by high computational and energy demands. Inspired by the mammalian navigation system, we introduce SpikeVPR, a bio-inspired and neuromorphic approach combining event-based cameras with spiking neural networks (SNNs) to generate compact, invariant place descriptors from few exemplars, achieving robust recognition under extreme changes in illumination, viewpoint, and appearance. SpikeVPR is trained end-to-end using surrogate gradient learning and incorporates EventDilation, a novel augmentation strategy enhancing robustness to speed and temporal variations. Evaluated on two challenging benchmarks (Brisbane-Event-VPR and NSAVP), SpikeVPR achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art deep networks while using 50 times fewer parameters and consuming 30 and 250 times less energy, enabling real-time deployment on mobile and neuromorphic platforms. These results demonstrate that spike-based coding offers an efficient pathway toward robust VPR in complex, changing environments.

Sylvain Colomer, Nicolas Cuperlier, Guillaume Bresson et al.

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised neural network model for visual information encoding which aims to address the problem of large-scale visual localization. Inspired by the structure of the visual cortex, the model (namely HSD) alternates layers of topologic sparse coding and pooling to build a more compact code of visual information. Intended for visual place recognition (VPR) systems that use local descriptors, the impact of its integration in a bio-inpired model for self-localization (LPMP) is evaluated. Our experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that HSD improves the runtime speed of LPMP by a factor of at least 2 and its localization accuracy by 10%. A comparison with CoHog, a state-of-the-art VPR approach, showed that our method achieves slightly better results.