Peiyu Chen

Weipeng Guan, Peiyu Chen, Yuhan Xie et al.

Event cameras are motion-activated sensors that capture pixel-level illumination changes instead of the intensity image with a fixed frame rate. Compared with the standard cameras, it can provide reliable visual perception during high-speed motions and in high dynamic range scenarios. However, event cameras output only a little information or even noise when the relative motion between the camera and the scene is limited, such as in a still state. While standard cameras can provide rich perception information in most scenarios, especially in good lighting conditions. These two cameras are exactly complementary. In this paper, we proposed a robust, high-accurate, and real-time optimization-based monocular event-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method with event-corner features, line-based event features, and point-based image features. The proposed method offers to leverage the point-based features in the nature scene and line-based features in the human-made scene to provide more additional structure or constraints information through well-design feature management. Experiments in the public benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art image-based or event-based VIO. Finally, we used our method to demonstrate an onboard closed-loop autonomous quadrotor flight and large-scale outdoor experiments. Videos of the evaluations are presented on our project website: https://b23.tv/OE3QM6j

Peiyu Chen, Fuling Lin, Weipeng Guan et al.

Event cameras asynchronously output low-latency event streams, promising for state estimation in high-speed motion and challenging lighting conditions. As opposed to frame-based cameras, the motion-dependent nature of event cameras presents persistent challenges in achieving robust event feature detection and matching. In recent years, learning-based approaches have demonstrated superior robustness over traditional handcrafted methods in feature detection and matching, particularly under aggressive motion and HDR scenarios. In this paper, we propose SuperEIO, a novel framework that leverages the learning-based event-only detection and IMU measurements to achieve event-inertial odometry. Our event-only feature detection employs a convolutional neural network under continuous event streams. Moreover, our system adopts the graph neural network to achieve event descriptor matching for loop closure. The proposed system utilizes TensorRT to accelerate the inference speed of deep networks, which ensures low-latency processing and robust real-time operation on resource-limited platforms. Besides, we evaluate our method extensively on multiple public datasets, demonstrating its superior accuracy and robustness compared to other state-of-the-art event-based methods. We have also open-sourced our pipeline to facilitate research in the field: https://github.com/arclab-hku/SuperEIO.

Weipeng Guan, Peiyu Chen, Huibin Zhao et al.

Event cameras are bio-inspired, motion-activated sensors that demonstrate substantial potential in handling challenging situations, such as motion blur and high-dynamic range. In this paper, we proposed EVI-SAM to tackle the problem of 6 DoF pose tracking and 3D reconstruction using monocular event camera. A novel event-based hybrid tracking framework is designed to estimate the pose, leveraging the robustness of feature matching and the precision of direct alignment. Specifically, we develop an event-based 2D-2D alignment to construct the photometric constraint, and tightly integrate it with the event-based reprojection constraint. The mapping module recovers the dense and colorful depth of the scene through the image-guided event-based mapping method. Subsequently, the appearance, texture, and surface mesh of the 3D scene can be reconstructed by fusing the dense depth map from multiple viewpoints using truncated signed distance function (TSDF) fusion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first non-learning work to realize event-based dense mapping. Numerical evaluations are performed on both publicly available and self-collected datasets, which qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Our EVI-SAM effectively balances accuracy and robustness while maintaining computational efficiency, showcasing superior pose tracking and dense mapping performance in challenging scenarios. Video Demo: https://youtu.be/Nn40U4e5Si8.

Xichen Pan, Peiyu Chen, Yichen Gong et al.

Training Transformer-based models demands a large amount of data, while obtaining aligned and labelled data in multimodality is rather cost-demanding, especially for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). Thus it makes a lot of sense to make use of unlabelled unimodal data. On the other side, although the effectiveness of large-scale self-supervised learning is well established in both audio and visual modalities, how to integrate those pre-trained models into a multimodal scenario remains underexplored. In this work, we successfully leverage unimodal self-supervised learning to promote the multimodal AVSR. In particular, audio and visual front-ends are trained on large-scale unimodal datasets, then we integrate components of both front-ends into a larger multimodal framework which learns to recognize parallel audio-visual data into characters through a combination of CTC and seq2seq decoding. We show that both components inherited from unimodal self-supervised learning cooperate well, resulting in that the multimodal framework yields competitive results through fine-tuning. Our model is experimentally validated on both word-level and sentence-level tasks. Especially, even without an external language model, our proposed model raises the state-of-the-art performances on the widely accepted Lip Reading Sentences 2 (LRS2) dataset by a large margin, with a relative improvement of 30%.