Event-based High Dynamic Range Image and Very High Frame Rate Video Generation using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
This work addresses the challenge of processing event camera outputs for computer vision tasks, offering a method to convert event data into usable images and videos, which is incremental as it adapts existing GAN techniques to a new sensor modality.
The paper tackles the problem of generating intensity images and videos from event camera data, which outputs asynchronous events instead of images, by using conditional generative adversarial networks. The result demonstrates the generation of high dynamic range images in extreme illumination and non-blurred images under rapid motion, with the potential for very high frame rate videos up to 1 million FPS.
Event cameras have a lot of advantages over traditional cameras, such as low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, since the outputs of event cameras are the sequences of asynchronous events overtime rather than actual intensity images, existing algorithms could not be directly applied. Therefore, it is demanding to generate intensity images from events for other tasks. In this paper, we unlock the potential of event camera-based conditional generative adversarial networks to create images/videos from an adjustable portion of the event data stream. The stacks of space-time coordinates of events are used as inputs and the network is trained to reproduce images based on the spatio-temporal intensity changes. The usefulness of event cameras to generate high dynamic range(HDR) images even in extreme illumination conditions and also non blurred images under rapid motion is also shown.In addition, the possibility of generating very high frame rate videos is demonstrated, theoretically up to 1 million frames per second (FPS) since the temporal resolution of event cameras are about 1μs. Proposed methods are evaluated by comparing the results with the intensity images captured on the same pixel grid-line of events using online available real datasets and synthetic datasets produced by the event camera simulator.