FS-DVS: A Frequency-Selective Dynamic Visual Sensing Paradigm for Enhancing Information Completeness
This work addresses the information incompleteness problem in dynamic vision sensors for neuromorphic vision applications, offering a biologically plausible and robust solution.
FS-DVS introduces a frequency-selective dynamic vision sensing paradigm that integrates a learnable spatial filter before event triggering, mimicking biological retinal ganglion cells. This approach achieves substantial performance gains in object detection and action recognition while demonstrating high noise resilience.
Dynamic vision sensors (DVS) offer exceptional temporal resolution and dynamic range by asynchronously reporting pixel-level intensity changes. However, conventional DVS rely on a per-pixel independent triggering mechanism, ignoring the spatial integration performed by biological retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Consequently, they lack the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and its inherent sensitivity to mid-spatial frequencies, which inevitably leads to information incompleteness due to sub-threshold signal loss. To bridge this gap, we propose FS-DVS (Frequency-Selective Dynamic Vision Sensor), a novel paradigm that integrates a learnable spatial filter strictly preceding the event triggering process to mimic the RGC aggregation mechanism. By developing a differentiable event simulation framework, the spatial filter can be optimized end-to-end with downstream tasks. Our study reveals that starting from a delta function, the learned spatial filters spontaneously evolve into center-surround patterns that emphasize mid-frequency components, consistently aligning with human CSF. Beyond achieving substantial performance gains in object detection and action recognition, the consistent convergence to human-like CSF characteristics across different tasks underscores the universality of this mid-frequency selective mechanism. Compared to naively increasing sensor sensitivity or relying on post-processing, our paradigm achieves selective information enhancement with high noise resilience, providing a robust, biologically plausible blueprint for next-generation neuromorphic sensors.