Neuromorphic Event-Based Generalized Time-Based Stereovision

Sio-Hoi Ieng, Joao Carneiro, Marc Osswald, Ryad Benosman

3D reconstruction from multiple viewpoints is an important problem in machine vision that allows recovering tridimensional structures from multiple two-dimensional views of a given scene. Reconstructions from multiple views are conventionally achieved through a process of pixel luminance-based matching between different views. Unlike conventional machine vision methods that solve matching ambiguities by operating only on spatial constraints and luminance, this paper introduces a fully time-based solution to stereovision using the high temporal resolution of neuromorphic asynchronous event-based cameras. These cameras output dynamic visual information in the form of what is known as "change events" that encode the time, the location and the sign of the luminance changes. A more advanced event-based camera, the Asynchronous Time-based Image Sensor (ATIS), in addition of change events, encodes absolute luminance as time differences. The stereovision problem can then be formulated solely in the time domain as a problem of events coincidences detection problem. This work is improving existing event-based stereovision techniques by adding luminance information that increases the matching reliability. It also introduces a formulation that does not require to build local frames (though it is still possible) from the luminances which can be costly to implement. Finally, this work also introduces a methodology for time based stereovision in the context of binocular and trinocular configurations using time based event matching criterion combining for the first time all together: space, time, luminance, and motion.