Real-Time Panoramic Tracking for Event Cameras

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel real-time panoramic camera tracking method for event cameras that relies solely on event spatial positions, enabling robust tracking during fast movements and dynamic scenes.

Contribution

It presents a direct, minimal-information approach to event camera tracking in panoramic settings, advancing beyond appearance-based methods.

Findings

Robust tracking during fast camera movements

Effective in dynamic scenes with moving objects

Validated on new and self-recorded datasets

Abstract

Event cameras are a paradigm shift in camera technology. Instead of full frames, the sensor captures a sparse set of events caused by intensity changes. Since only the changes are transferred, those cameras are able to capture quick movements of objects in the scene or of the camera itself. In this work we propose a novel method to perform camera tracking of event cameras in a panoramic setting with three degrees of freedom. We propose a direct camera tracking formulation, similar to state-of-the-art in visual odometry. We show that the minimal information needed for simultaneous tracking and mapping is the spatial position of events, without using the appearance of the imaged scene point. We verify the robustness to fast camera movements and dynamic objects in the scene on a recently proposed dataset and self-recorded sequences.