ESL: Event-based Structured Light

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel event-based structured light system using an event camera and laser projector for high-speed, accurate depth sensing, outperforming existing methods especially under rapid motion conditions.

Contribution

It presents a new structured-light approach leveraging event camera correlations and spatio-temporal consistency to improve depth accuracy at high speeds.

Findings

Reduces RMSE by 83% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Robust to event jitter and high-speed motion.

Outperforms existing 3D reconstruction techniques.

Abstract

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors providing significant advantages over standard cameras such as low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. We propose a novel structured-light system using an event camera to tackle the problem of accurate and high-speed depth sensing. Our setup consists of an event camera and a laser-point projector that uniformly illuminates the scene in a raster scanning pattern during 16 ms. Previous methods match events independently of each other, and so they deliver noisy depth estimates at high scanning speeds in the presence of signal latency and jitter. In contrast, we optimize an energy function designed to exploit event correlations, called spatio-temporal consistency. The resulting method is robust to event jitter and therefore performs better at higher scanning speeds. Experiments demonstrate that our method can deal with high-speed motion and outperform state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction methods based on event cameras, reducing the RMSE by 83% on average, for the same acquisition time.