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Neural networks are seeing rapid adoption in purely inertial odometry, where accelerometer and gyroscope measurements from commodity inertial measurement units (IMU) are used to regress displacements and associated uncertainties. They can learn informative displacement priors, which can be directly fused with the raw data with off-the-shelf non-linear filters. Nevertheless, these networks do not consider the physical roto-reflective symmetries inherent in IMU data, leading to the need to memorize the same priors for every possible motion direction, which hinders generalization. In this work, we characterize these symmetries and show that the IMU data and the resulting displacement and covariance transform equivariantly, when rotated around the gravity vector and reflected with respect to arbitrary planes parallel to gravity. We design a neural network that respects these symmetries by design through equivariant processing in three steps: First, it estimates an equivariant gravity-aligned frame from equivariant vectors and invariant scalars derived from IMU data, leveraging expressive linear and non-linear layers tailored to commute with the underlying symmetry transformation. We then map the IMU data into this frame, thereby achieving an invariant canonicalization that can be directly used with off-the-shelf inertial odometry networks. Finally, we map these network outputs back into the original frame, thereby obtaining equivariant covariances and displacements. We demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to the filter-based approach based on TLIO, and the end-to-end RONIN architecture, and show better performance on the TLIO, Aria, RIDI and OxIOD datasets than existing methods., Comment: 27 pages

Visual Odometry (VO) is essential to downstream mobile robotics and augmented/virtual reality tasks. Despite recent advances, existing VO methods still rely on heuristic design choices that require several weeks of hyperparameter tuning by human experts, hindering generalizability and robustness. We address these challenges by reframing VO as a sequential decision-making task and applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to adapt the VO process dynamically. Our approach introduces a neural network, operating as an agent within the VO pipeline, to make decisions such as keyframe and grid-size selection based on real-time conditions. Our method minimizes reliance on heuristic choices using a reward function based on pose error, runtime, and other metrics to guide the system. Our RL framework treats the VO system and the image sequence as an environment, with the agent receiving observations from keypoints, map statistics, and prior poses. Experimental results using classical VO methods and public benchmarks demonstrate improvements in accuracy and robustness, validating the generalizability of our RL-enhanced VO approach to different scenarios. We believe this paradigm shift advances VO technology by eliminating the need for time-intensive parameter tuning of heuristics.

In this paper, we present an end-to-end multi-source Entity Matching problem, which we call entity group matching, where the goal is to assign to the same group, records originating from multiple data sources but representing the same real-world entity. We focus on the effects of transitively matched records, i.e. the records connected by paths in the graph G = (V,E) whose nodes and edges represent the records and whether they are a match or not. We present a real-world instance of this problem, where the challenge is to match records of companies and financial securities originating from different data providers. We also introduce two new multi-source benchmark datasets that present similar matching challenges as real-world records. A distinctive characteristic of these records is that they are regularly updated following real-world events, but updates are not applied uniformly across data sources. This phenomenon makes the matching of certain groups of records only possible through the use of transitive information. In our experiments, we illustrate how considering transitively matched records is challenging since a limited amount of false positive pairwise match predictions can throw off the group assignment of large quantities of records. Thus, we propose GraLMatch, a method that can partially detect and remove false positive pairwise predictions through graph-based properties. Finally, we showcase how fine-tuning a Transformer-based model (DistilBERT) on a reduced number of labeled samples yields a better final entity group matching than training on more samples and/or incorporating fine-tuning optimizations, illustrating how precision becomes the deciding factor in the entity group matching of large volumes of records., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, accepted as research paper at EDBT 2025

The final stages of a protoplanetary disk are essential for our understanding of the formation and evolution of planets. Photoevaporation is an important mechanism that contributes to the dispersal of an accretion disk and has significant consequences for the disk's lifetime. However, the combined effects of photoevaporation and star-disk interaction have not been investigated in previous studies. We combined an implicit disk evolution model with a photoevaporative mass-loss profile. By including the innermost disk regions down to 0.01 AU, we could calculate the star-disk interaction, the stellar spin evolution, and the transition from an accreting disk to the propeller regime self-consistently. Starting from an early Class II star-disk system, we calculated the long-term evolution of the system until the disk becomes almost completely dissolved. Photoevaporation has a significant effect on disk structure and evolution. The radial extent of the dead zone decreases, and the number of episodic accretion events (outbursts) is reduced by high stellar X-ray luminosities. Reasonable accretion rates in combination with photoevaporative gaps are possible for a dead zone that is still massive enough to develop episodic accretion events. Furthermore, the stellar spin evolution during the Class II evolution is less affected by the star-disk interaction in the case of high X-ray luminosities. Our results suggest that the formation of planets, especially habitable planets, in the dead zone is strongly impaired in the case of strong X-ray luminosities. Additionally, the importance of the star-disk interaction during the Class II phase with respect to the stellar spin evolution is reduced., Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Event cameras respond primarily to edges--formed by strong gradients--and are thus particularly well-suited for line-based motion estimation. Recent work has shown that events generated by a single line each satisfy a polynomial constraint which describes a manifold in the space-time volume. Multiple such constraints can be solved simultaneously to recover the partial linear velocity and line parameters. In this work, we show that, with a suitable line parametrization, this system of constraints is actually linear in the unknowns, which allows us to design a novel linear solver. Unlike existing solvers, our linear solver (i) is fast and numerically stable since it does not rely on expensive root finding, (ii) can solve both minimal and overdetermined systems with more than 5 events, and (iii) admits the characterization of all degenerate cases and multiple solutions. The found line parameters are singularity-free and have a fixed scale, which eliminates the need for auxiliary constraints typically encountered in previous work. To recover the full linear camera velocity we fuse observations from multiple lines with a novel velocity averaging scheme that relies on a geometrically-motivated residual, and thus solves the problem more efficiently than previous schemes which minimize an algebraic residual. Extensive experiments in synthetic and real-world settings demonstrate that our method surpasses the previous work in numerical stability, and operates over 600 times faster.

Today, state-of-the-art deep neural networks that process event-camera data first convert a temporal window of events into dense, grid-like input representations. As such, they exhibit poor generalizability when deployed at higher inference frequencies (i.e., smaller temporal windows) than the ones they were trained on. We address this challenge by introducing state-space models (SSMs) with learnable timescale parameters to event-based vision. This design adapts to varying frequencies without the need to retrain the network at different frequencies. Additionally, we investigate two strategies to counteract aliasing effects when deploying the model at higher frequencies. We comprehensively evaluate our approach against existing methods based on RNN and Transformer architectures across various benchmarks, including Gen1 and 1 Mpx event camera datasets. Our results demonstrate that SSM-based models train 33% faster and also exhibit minimal performance degradation when tested at higher frequencies than the training input. Traditional RNN and Transformer models exhibit performance drops of more than 20 mAP, with SSMs having a drop of 3.76 mAP, highlighting the effectiveness of SSMs in event-based vision tasks., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables, CVPR 2024 Camera Ready paper

Object detection with event cameras benefits from the sensor's low latency and high dynamic range. However, it is costly to fully label event streams for supervised training due to their high temporal resolution. To reduce this cost, we present LEOD, the first method for label-efficient event-based detection. Our approach unifies weakly- and semi-supervised object detection with a self-training mechanism. We first utilize a detector pre-trained on limited labels to produce pseudo ground truth on unlabeled events. Then, the detector is re-trained with both real and generated labels. Leveraging the temporal consistency of events, we run bi-directional inference and apply tracking-based post-processing to enhance the quality of pseudo labels. To stabilize training against label noise, we further design a soft anchor assignment strategy. We introduce new experimental protocols to evaluate the task of label-efficient event-based detection on Gen1 and 1Mpx datasets. LEOD consistently outperforms supervised baselines across various labeling ratios. For example, on Gen1, it improves mAP by 8.6% and 7.8% for RVT-S trained with 1% and 2% labels. On 1Mpx, RVT-S with 10% labels even surpasses its fully-supervised counterpart using 100% labels. LEOD maintains its effectiveness even when all labeled data are available, reaching new state-of-the-art results. Finally, we show that our method readily scales to improve larger detectors as well. Code is released at https://github.com/Wuziyi616/LEOD, Comment: CVPR 2024. Code: https://github.com/Wuziyi616/LEOD

Event-based cameras are ideal for line-based motion estimation, since they predominantly respond to edges in the scene. However, accurately determining the camera displacement based on events continues to be an open problem. This is because line feature extraction and dynamics estimation are tightly coupled when using event cameras, and no precise model is currently available for describing the complex structures generated by lines in the space-time volume of events. We solve this problem by deriving the correct non-linear parametrization of such manifolds, which we term eventails, and demonstrate its application to event-based linear motion estimation, with known rotation from an Inertial Measurement Unit. Using this parametrization, we introduce a novel minimal 5-point solver that jointly estimates line parameters and linear camera velocity projections, which can be fused into a single, averaged linear velocity when considering multiple lines. We demonstrate on both synthetic and real data that our solver generates more stable relative motion estimates than other methods while capturing more inliers than clustering based on spatio-temporal planes. In particular, our method consistently achieves a 100% success rate in estimating linear velocity where existing closed-form solvers only achieve between 23% and 70%. The proposed eventails contribute to a better understanding of spatio-temporal event-generated geometries and we thus believe it will become a core building block of future event-based motion estimation algorithms.

Visual Odometry (VO) is crucial for autonomous robotic navigation, especially in GPS-denied environments like planetary terrains. To improve robustness, recent model-based VO systems have begun combining standard and event-based cameras. While event cameras excel in low-light and high-speed motion, standard cameras provide dense and easier-to-track features. However, the field of image- and event-based VO still predominantly relies on model-based methods and is yet to fully integrate recent image-only advancements leveraging end-to-end learning-based architectures. Seamlessly integrating the two modalities remains challenging due to their different nature, one asynchronous, the other not, limiting the potential for a more effective image- and event-based VO. We introduce RAMP-VO, the first end-to-end learned image- and event-based VO system. It leverages novel Recurrent, Asynchronous, and Massively Parallel (RAMP) encoders capable of fusing asynchronous events with image data, providing 8x faster inference and 33% more accurate predictions than existing solutions. Despite being trained only in simulation, RAMP-VO outperforms previous methods on the newly introduced Apollo and Malapert datasets, and on existing benchmarks, where it improves image- and event-based methods by 58.8% and 30.6%, paving the way for robust and asynchronous VO in space., Comment: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

Today, state-of-the-art deep neural networks that process events first convert them into dense, grid-like input representations before using an off-the-shelf network. However, selecting the appropriate representation for the task traditionally requires training a neural network for each representation and selecting the best one based on the validation score, which is very time-consuming. This work eliminates this bottleneck by selecting representations based on the Gromov-Wasserstein Discrepancy (GWD) between raw events and their representation. It is about 200 times faster to compute than training a neural network and preserves the task performance ranking of event representations across multiple representations, network backbones, datasets, and tasks. Thus finding representations with high task scores is equivalent to finding representations with a low GWD. We use this insight to, for the first time, perform a hyperparameter search on a large family of event representations, revealing new and powerful representations that exceed the state-of-the-art. Our optimized representations outperform existing representations by 1.7 mAP on the 1 Mpx dataset and 0.3 mAP on the Gen1 dataset, two established object detection benchmarks, and reach a 3.8% higher classification score on the mini N-ImageNet benchmark. Moreover, we outperform state-of-the-art by 2.1 mAP on Gen1 and state-of-the-art feed-forward methods by 6.0 mAP on the 1 Mpx datasets. This work opens a new unexplored field of explicit representation optimization for event-based learning., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, ICCV 2023 Camera Ready paper

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are a class of bio-inspired neural networks that promise to bring low-power and low-latency inference to edge devices through asynchronous and sparse processing. However, being temporal models, SNNs depend heavily on expressive states to generate predictions on par with classical artificial neural networks (ANNs). These states converge only after long transient periods, and quickly decay without input data, leading to higher latency, power consumption, and lower accuracy. This work addresses this issue by initializing the state with an auxiliary ANN running at a low rate. The SNN then uses the state to generate predictions with high temporal resolution until the next initialization phase. Our hybrid ANN-SNN model thus combines the best of both worlds: It does not suffer from long state transients and state decay thanks to the ANN, and can generate predictions with high temporal resolution, low latency, and low power thanks to the SNN. We show for the task of event-based 2D and 3D human pose estimation that our method consumes 88% less power with only a 4% decrease in performance compared to its fully ANN counterparts when run at the same inference rate. Moreover, when compared to SNNs, our method achieves a 74% lower error. This research thus provides a new understanding of how ANNs and SNNs can be used to maximize their respective benefits.

Event cameras triggered a paradigm shift in the computer vision community delineated by their asynchronous nature, low latency, and high dynamic range. Calibration of event cameras is always essential to account for the sensor intrinsic parameters and for 3D perception. However, conventional image-based calibration techniques are not applicable due to the asynchronous, binary output of the sensor. The current standard for calibrating event cameras relies on either blinking patterns or event-based image reconstruction algorithms. These approaches are difficult to deploy in factory settings and are affected by noise and artifacts degrading the calibration performance. To bridge these limitations, we present E-Calib, a novel, fast, robust, and accurate calibration toolbox for event cameras utilizing the asymmetric circle grid, for its robustness to out-of-focus scenes. The proposed method is tested in a variety of rigorous experiments for different event camera models, on circle grids with different geometric properties, and under challenging illumination conditions. The results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in detection success rate, reprojection error, and estimation accuracy of extrinsic parameters., Comment: 13 pages, 6 tables, 15 figures

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, but their high computational cost, quadratic in the number of tokens, limits their adoption in computation-constrained applications. However, this large number of tokens may not be necessary, as not all tokens are equally important. In this paper, we investigate token pruning to accelerate inference for object detection and instance segmentation, extending prior works from image classification. Through extensive experiments, we offer four insights for dense tasks: (i) tokens should not be completely pruned and discarded, but rather preserved in the feature maps for later use. (ii) reactivating previously pruned tokens can further enhance model performance. (iii) a dynamic pruning rate based on images is better than a fixed pruning rate. (iv) a lightweight, 2-layer MLP can effectively prune tokens, achieving accuracy comparable with complex gating networks with a simpler design. We assess the effects of these design decisions on the COCO dataset and introduce an approach that incorporates these findings, showing a reduction in performance decline from ~1.5 mAP to ~0.3 mAP in both boxes and masks, compared to existing token pruning methods. In relation to the dense counterpart that utilizes all tokens, our method realizes an increase in inference speed, achieving up to 34% faster performance for the entire network and 46% for the backbone.

We investigate the influence of an accretion disk on the angular momentum (AM) evolution of young M dwarfs, which parameters govern the AM distribution after the disk phase, and whether this leads to a mass-independent distribution of SAM. We find that above an initial rate $\dot{M}_\mathrm{crit} \sim 10^{-8}~\mathrm{M_\odot/yr}$ accretion "erases" the initial SAM of M dwarfs during the disk lifetime, and stellar rotation converges to values of SAM that are largely independent of initial conditions. For stellar masses $> 0.3~\mathrm{M_\odot}$, we find that observed initial accretion rates $\dot{M}_\mathrm{init}$ are comparable to or exceed $\dot{M}_\mathrm{crit}$. Furthermore, stellar SAM after the disk phase scales with the stellar magnetic field strength as a power-law with an exponent of $-1.1$. For lower stellar masses, $\dot{M}_\mathrm{init}$ is predicted to be smaller than $\dot{M}_\mathrm{crit}$ and the initial conditions are imprinted in the stellar SAM after the disk phase. To explain the observed mass-independent distribution of SAM, the stellar magnetic field strength has to range between 20~G and 500~G (700~G and 1500~G) for a 0.1~$\mathrm{M_\odot}$ (0.6~$\mathrm{M_\odot}$) star. These values match observed large-scale magnetic field measurements of young M~dwarfs and the positive relation between stellar mass and magnetic field strength agrees with a theoretically-motivated scaling relation. The scaling law between stellar SAM, mass, and the magnetic field strength is consistent for young stars, where these parameters are constrained by observations. Due to the very limited number of available data, we advocate for efforts to obtain more such measurements. Our results provide new constraints on the relation between stellar mass and magnetic field strength and can be used as initial conditions for future stellar spin models, starting after the disk phase. (shortened), Comment: accepted for publication in A&A

Optical flow provides information on relative motion that is an important component in many computer vision pipelines. Neural networks provide high accuracy optical flow, yet their complexity is often prohibitive for application at the edge or in robots, where efficiency and latency play crucial role. To address this challenge, we build on the latest developments in event-based vision and spiking neural networks. We propose a new network architecture, inspired by Timelens, that improves the state-of-the-art self-supervised optical flow accuracy when operated both in spiking and non-spiking mode. To implement a real-time pipeline with a physical event camera, we propose a methodology for principled model simplification based on activity and latency analysis. We demonstrate high speed optical flow prediction with almost two orders of magnitude reduced complexity while maintaining the accuracy, opening the path for real-time deployments., Comment: Accepted for IEEE CVPRW, Vancouver 2023. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media. Copyright 2023 IEEE

Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive information greatly enhances this capability since perceiving their surroundings allows them to adapt their controller and thus achieve higher levels of robustness. However, sensors such as LiDARs and RGB cameras do not provide sufficient information to quickly and precisely react in a highly dynamic environment since they suffer from a bandwidth-latency tradeoff. They require significant bandwidth at high frame rates while featuring significant perceptual latency at lower frame rates, thereby limiting their versatility on resource-constrained platforms. In this work, we tackle this problem by equipping our quadruped with an event camera, which does not suffer from this tradeoff due to its asynchronous and sparse operation. In leveraging the low latency of the events, we push the limits of quadruped agility and demonstrate high-speed ball catching for the first time. We show that our quadruped equipped with an event camera can catch objects with speeds up to 15 m/s from 4 meters, with a success rate of 83%. Using a VGA event camera, our method runs at 100 Hz on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin.

We compute the evolution and rotational periods of young stars, using the MESA code, starting from a stellar seed, and take protostellar accretion, stellar winds, and the magnetic star-disk interaction into account. Furthermore, we add a certain fraction of the energy of accreted material into the stellar interior as additional heat and combine the resulting effects on stellar evolution with the stellar spin model. For different combinations of parameters, stellar periods at an age of 1~Myr range between 0.6~days and 12.9~days. Thus, during the relatively short time period of 1~Myr, a significant amount of stellar angular momentum can already be removed by the interaction between the star and its accretion disk. The amount of additional heat added into the stellar interior, the accretion history, and the presence of disk and stellar winds have the strongest impact on the stellar spin evolution during the first million years. The slowest stellar rotations result from a combination of strong magnetic fields, a large amount of additional heat, and effective winds. The fastest rotators combine weak magnetic fields and ineffective winds or result from a small amount of additional heat added to the star. Scenarios that could lead to such configurations are discussed. Different initial rotation periods of the stellar seed, on the other hand, quickly converges and do not affect the stellar period at all. Our model matches up to 90\% of the observed rotation periods in six young ($\lesssim 3$~Myr) clusters. Based on these intriguing results, we motivate to combine our model with a hydrodynamic disk evolution code to self-consistently include several important aspects such as episodic accretion events, magnetic disk winds, internal, and external photo-evaporation. (Shortened), Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

We present Recurrent Vision Transformers (RVTs), a novel backbone for object detection with event cameras. Event cameras provide visual information with sub-millisecond latency at a high-dynamic range and with strong robustness against motion blur. These unique properties offer great potential for low-latency object detection and tracking in time-critical scenarios. Prior work in event-based vision has achieved outstanding detection performance but at the cost of substantial inference time, typically beyond 40 milliseconds. By revisiting the high-level design of recurrent vision backbones, we reduce inference time by a factor of 6 while retaining similar performance. To achieve this, we explore a multi-stage design that utilizes three key concepts in each stage: First, a convolutional prior that can be regarded as a conditional positional embedding. Second, local and dilated global self-attention for spatial feature interaction. Third, recurrent temporal feature aggregation to minimize latency while retaining temporal information. RVTs can be trained from scratch to reach state-of-the-art performance on event-based object detection - achieving an mAP of 47.2% on the Gen1 automotive dataset. At the same time, RVTs offer fast inference (<12 ms on a T4 GPU) and favorable parameter efficiency (5 times fewer than prior art). Our study brings new insights into effective design choices that can be fruitful for research beyond event-based vision.

Because of their high temporal resolution, increased resilience to motion blur, and very sparse output, event cameras have been shown to be ideal for low-latency and low-bandwidth feature tracking, even in challenging scenarios. Existing feature tracking methods for event cameras are either handcrafted or derived from first principles but require extensive parameter tuning, are sensitive to noise, and do not generalize to different scenarios due to unmodeled effects. To tackle these deficiencies, we introduce the first data-driven feature tracker for event cameras, which leverages low-latency events to track features detected in a grayscale frame. We achieve robust performance via a novel frame attention module, which shares information across feature tracks. By directly transferring zero-shot from synthetic to real data, our data-driven tracker outperforms existing approaches in relative feature age by up to 120% while also achieving the lowest latency. This performance gap is further increased to 130% by adapting our tracker to real data with a novel self-supervision strategy.

State-of-the-art machine-learning methods for event cameras treat events as dense representations and process them with conventional deep neural networks. Thus, they fail to maintain the sparsity and asynchronous nature of event data, thereby imposing significant computation and latency constraints on downstream systems. A recent line of work tackles this issue by modeling events as spatiotemporally evolving graphs that can be efficiently and asynchronously processed using graph neural networks. These works showed impressive computation reductions, yet their accuracy is still limited by the small scale and shallow depth of their network, both of which are required to reduce computation. In this work, we break this glass ceiling by introducing several architecture choices which allow us to scale the depth and complexity of such models while maintaining low computation. On object detection tasks, our smallest model shows up to 3.7 times lower computation, while outperforming state-of-the-art asynchronous methods by 7.4 mAP. Even when scaling to larger model sizes, we are 13% more efficient than state-of-the-art while outperforming it by 11.5 mAP. As a result, our method runs 3.7 times faster than a dense graph neural network, taking only 8.4 ms per forward pass. This opens the door to efficient, and accurate object detection in edge-case scenarios.

The effects of an accretion disk are crucial to understanding the evolution of young stars. During the combined evolution, stellar and disk parameters influence each other, motivating a combined stellar and disk model. This makes a combined numerical model, evolving the disk alongside the star, the next logical step in the progress of studying early stellar evolution. We aim to understand the effects of metallicity on the accretion disk and the stellar spin evolution during the T~Tauri phase. We combine the numerical treatment of a hydrodynamic disk with stellar evolution, including a stellar spin model, allowing a self-consistent calculation of the back-reactions between the individual components. We present the self-consistent theoretical evolution of T-Tauri stars coupled to a stellar disk. We find that disks in low metallicity environments are heated differently and have shorter lifetimes, compared to their solar metallicity counterparts. Differences in stellar radii, the contraction rate of the stellar radius, and the shorter disk lifetimes result in faster rotation of low metallicity stars. We present an additional explanation for the observed short disk lifetimes in low metallicity clusters. A combination of our model with previous studies (e.g., a metallicity-based photo-evaporation) could help to understand disk evolution and dispersal at different metallicities. Furthermore, the stellar spin evolution model includes several important effects, previously ignored (e.g., the stellar magnetic field strength and a realistic calculation of the disk lifetime) and we motivate to include our results as initial or input parameters for further spin evolution models, covering the stellar evolution towards and during the main sequence., Comment: accepted for publication in A&A

The spin evolution of young protostars, surrounded by an accretion disk, still poses problems for observations and theoretical models. In recent studies, the importance of the magnetic star-disk interaction for stellar spin evolution has been elaborated. The accretion disk in these studies, however, is only represented by a simplified model and important features are not considered. We combined the implicit hydrodynamic TAPIR disk code with a stellar spin evolution model. The influence of stellar magnetic fields on the disk dynamics, the radial position of the inner disk radius, as well as the influence of stellar rotation on the disk were calculated self-consistently. Within a defined parameter space, we can reproduce the majority of fast and slow rotating stars observed in young stellar clusters. Additionally, the back reaction of different stellar spin evolutionary tracks on the disk can be analyzed. Disks around fast rotating stars are located closer to the star. Consequently, the disk midplane temperature in the innermost disk region increases significantly compared to slow rotating stars. We can show the effects of stellar rotation on episodic accretion outbursts. The higher temperatures of disks around fast rotating stars result in more outbursts and a longer outbursting period over the disk lifetime. The combination of a long-term hydrodynamic disk and a stellar spin evolution model allows the inclusion of previously unconsidered effects such as the back-reaction of stellar rotation on the long-term disk evolution and the occurrence of accretion outbursts. However, a wider parameter range has to be studied to further investigate these effects. Additionally, a possible interaction between our model and a more realistic stellar evolution code (e.g., the MESA code) can improve our understanding of the stellar spin evolution and its effects on the pre-main sequence star., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics

Reliable perception during fast motion maneuvers or in high dynamic range environments is crucial for robotic systems. Since event cameras are robust to these challenging conditions, they have great potential to increase the reliability of robot vision. However, event-based vision has been held back by the shortage of labeled datasets due to the novelty of event cameras. To overcome this drawback, we propose a task transfer method to train models directly with labeled images and unlabeled event data. Compared to previous approaches, (i) our method transfers from single images to events instead of high frame rate videos, and (ii) does not rely on paired sensor data. To achieve this, we leverage the generative event model to split event features into content and motion features. This split enables efficient matching between latent spaces for events and images, which is crucial for successful task transfer. Thus, our approach unlocks the vast amount of existing image datasets for the training of event-based neural networks. Our task transfer method consistently outperforms methods targeting Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for object detection by 0.26 mAP (increase by 93%) and classification by 2.7% accuracy.

Due to their resilience to motion blur and high robustness in low-light and high dynamic range conditions, event cameras are poised to become enabling sensors for vision-based exploration on future Mars helicopter missions. However, existing event-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms either suffer from high tracking errors or are brittle, since they cannot cope with significant depth uncertainties caused by an unforeseen loss of tracking or other effects. In this work, we introduce EKLT-VIO, which addresses both limitations by combining a state-of-the-art event-based frontend with a filter-based backend. This makes it both accurate and robust to uncertainties, outperforming event- and frame-based VIO algorithms on challenging benchmarks by 32%. In addition, we demonstrate accurate performance in hover-like conditions (outperforming existing event-based methods) as well as high robustness in newly collected Mars-like and high-dynamic-range sequences, where existing frame-based methods fail. In doing so, we show that event-based VIO is the way forward for vision-based exploration on Mars.

The onset of nonlinear effects in metals, such as plasticity and damage, is strongly influenced by the heterogeneous stress distribution at the grain level. This work is devoted to studying the local stress distribution of shear stresses resolved in the slip systems as the critical driving force for plastic deformations. Specific grain orientations with respect to load direction are investigated in the linear elastic regime and at incipient plastic deformations based on a large ensemble of microstructures. The elastic anisotropy of the single crystal is found to have a crucial influence on the scatter of the stress distribution, whereas the Young's modulus in the respective crystal direction governs the mean stress in the grain. It is further demonstrated that, for higher anisotropy, the shear stresses deviate from the normal distribution and are better approximated by a log-normal fit. Comparing the full-field simulations to the Maximum Entropy Method (MEM), reveals that the MEM provides an excellent prediction up to the second statistical moment in the linear elastic range. In a study on the spatial distribution of shear stresses, the grain boundary is identified as a region of pronounced stress fluctuations and as the starting point of yielding during the elastic-plastic transition.

Recently, video frame interpolation using a combination of frame- and event-based cameras has surpassed traditional image-based methods both in terms of performance and memory efficiency. However, current methods still suffer from (i) brittle image-level fusion of complementary interpolation results, that fails in the presence of artifacts in the fused image, (ii) potentially temporally inconsistent and inefficient motion estimation procedures, that run for every inserted frame and (iii) low contrast regions that do not trigger events, and thus cause events-only motion estimation to generate artifacts. Moreover, previous methods were only tested on datasets consisting of planar and faraway scenes, which do not capture the full complexity of the real world. In this work, we address the above problems by introducing multi-scale feature-level fusion and computing one-shot non-linear inter-frame motion from events and images, which can be efficiently sampled for image warping. We also collect the first large-scale events and frames dataset consisting of more than 100 challenging scenes with depth variations, captured with a new experimental setup based on a beamsplitter. We show that our method improves the reconstruction quality by up to 0.2 dB in terms of PSNR and up to 15% in LPIPS score., Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New Orleans, 2022

The best performing learning algorithms devised for event cameras work by first converting events into dense representations that are then processed using standard CNNs. However, these steps discard both the sparsity and high temporal resolution of events, leading to high computational burden and latency. For this reason, recent works have adopted Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which process events as ``static" spatio-temporal graphs, which are inherently "sparse". We take this trend one step further by introducing Asynchronous, Event-based Graph Neural Networks (AEGNNs), a novel event-processing paradigm that generalizes standard GNNs to process events as ``evolving" spatio-temporal graphs. AEGNNs follow efficient update rules that restrict recomputation of network activations only to the nodes affected by each new event, thereby significantly reducing both computation and latency for event-by-event processing. AEGNNs are easily trained on synchronous inputs and can be converted to efficient, "asynchronous" networks at test time. We thoroughly validate our method on object classification and detection tasks, where we show an up to a 11-fold reduction in computational complexity (FLOPs), with similar or even better performance than state-of-the-art asynchronous methods. This reduction in computation directly translates to an 8-fold reduction in computational latency when compared to standard GNNs, which opens the door to low-latency event-based processing., Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), New Orleans, 2022

Due to their outstanding properties in challenging conditions, event cameras have become indispensable in a wide range of applications, ranging from automotive, computational photography, and SLAM. However, as further improvements are made to the sensor design, modern event cameras are trending toward higher and higher sensor resolutions, which result in higher bandwidth and computational requirements on downstream tasks. Despite this trend, the benefits of using high-resolution event cameras to solve standard computer vision tasks are still not clear. In this work, we report the surprising discovery that, in low-illumination conditions and at high speeds, low-resolution cameras can outperform high-resolution ones, while requiring a significantly lower bandwidth. We provide both empirical and theoretical evidence for this claim, which indicates that high-resolution event cameras exhibit higher per-pixel event rates, leading to higher temporal noise in low-illumination conditions and at high speeds. As a result, in most cases, high-resolution event cameras show a lower task performance, compared to lower resolution sensors in these conditions. We empirically validate our findings across several tasks, namely image reconstruction, optical flow estimation, and camera pose tracking, both on synthetic and real data. We believe that these findings will provide important guidelines for future trends in event camera development.

We present a method for estimating dense continuous-time optical flow from event data. Traditional dense optical flow methods compute the pixel displacement between two images. Due to missing information, these approaches cannot recover the pixel trajectories in the blind time between two images. In this work, we show that it is possible to compute per-pixel, continuous-time optical flow using events from an event camera. Events provide temporally fine-grained information about movement in pixel space due to their asynchronous nature and microsecond response time. We leverage these benefits to predict pixel trajectories densely in continuous time via parameterized B\'ezier curves. To achieve this, we build a neural network with strong inductive biases for this task: First, we build multiple sequential correlation volumes in time using event data. Second, we use B\'ezier curves to index these correlation volumes at multiple timestamps along the trajectory. Third, we use the retrieved correlation to update the B\'ezier curve representations iteratively. Our method can optionally include image pairs to boost performance further. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first method that can regress dense pixel trajectories from event data. To train and evaluate our model, we introduce a synthetic dataset (MultiFlow) that features moving objects and ground truth trajectories for every pixel. Our quantitative experiments not only suggest that our method successfully predicts pixel trajectories in continuous time but also that it is competitive in the traditional two-view pixel displacement metric on MultiFlow and DSEC-Flow. Open source code and datasets are released to the public.

Retrieving accurate semantic information in challenging high dynamic range (HDR) and high-speed conditions remains an open challenge for image-based algorithms due to severe image degradations. Event cameras promise to address these challenges since they feature a much higher dynamic range and are resilient to motion blur. Nonetheless, semantic segmentation with event cameras is still in its infancy which is chiefly due to the lack of high-quality, labeled datasets. In this work, we introduce ESS (Event-based Semantic Segmentation), which tackles this problem by directly transferring the semantic segmentation task from existing labeled image datasets to unlabeled events via unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Compared to existing UDA methods, our approach aligns recurrent, motion-invariant event embeddings with image embeddings. For this reason, our method neither requires video data nor per-pixel alignment between images and events and, crucially, does not need to hallucinate motion from still images. Additionally, we introduce DSEC-Semantic, the first large-scale event-based dataset with fine-grained labels. We show that using image labels alone, ESS outperforms existing UDA approaches, and when combined with event labels, it even outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches on both DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic. Finally, ESS is general-purpose, which unlocks the vast amount of existing labeled image datasets and paves the way for new and exciting research directions in new fields previously inaccessible for event cameras.

Modern high dynamic range (HDR) imaging pipelines align and fuse multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images captured at different exposure times. While these methods work well in static scenes, dynamic scenes remain a challenge since the LDR images still suffer from saturation and noise. In such scenarios, event cameras would be a valid complement, thanks to their higher temporal resolution and dynamic range. In this paper, we propose the first multi-bracket HDR pipeline combining a standard camera with an event camera. Our results show better overall robustness when using events, with improvements in PSNR by up to 5dB on synthetic data and up to 0.7dB on real-world data. We also introduce a new dataset containing bracketed LDR images with aligned events and HDR ground truth.

We propose to incorporate feature correlation and sequential processing into dense optical flow estimation from event cameras. Modern frame-based optical flow methods heavily rely on matching costs computed from feature correlation. In contrast, there exists no optical flow method for event cameras that explicitly computes matching costs. Instead, learning-based approaches using events usually resort to the U-Net architecture to estimate optical flow sparsely. Our key finding is that the introduction of correlation features significantly improves results compared to previous methods that solely rely on convolution layers. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our proposed approach computes dense optical flow and reduces the end-point error by 23% on MVSEC. Furthermore, we show that all existing optical flow methods developed so far for event cameras have been evaluated on datasets with very small displacement fields with a maximum flow magnitude of 10 pixels. Based on this observation, we introduce a new real-world dataset that exhibits displacement fields with magnitudes up to 210 pixels and 3 times higher camera resolution. Our proposed approach reduces the end-point error on this dataset by 66%., Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)

State-of-the-art frame interpolation methods generate intermediate frames by inferring object motions in the image from consecutive key-frames. In the absence of additional information, first-order approximations, i.e. optical flow, must be used, but this choice restricts the types of motions that can be modeled, leading to errors in highly dynamic scenarios. Event cameras are novel sensors that address this limitation by providing auxiliary visual information in the blind-time between frames. They asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes and do this with high temporal resolution and low latency. Event-based frame interpolation methods typically adopt a synthesis-based approach, where predicted frame residuals are directly applied to the key-frames. However, while these approaches can capture non-linear motions they suffer from ghosting and perform poorly in low-texture regions with few events. Thus, synthesis-based and flow-based approaches are complementary. In this work, we introduce Time Lens, a novel indicates equal contribution method that leverages the advantages of both. We extensively evaluate our method on three synthetic and two real benchmarks where we show an up to 5.21 dB improvement in terms of PSNR over state-of-the-art frame-based and event-based methods. Finally, we release a new large-scale dataset in highly dynamic scenarios, aimed at pushing the limits of existing methods.

We propose a generic event camera calibration framework using image reconstruction. Instead of relying on blinking LED patterns or external screens, we show that neural-network-based image reconstruction is well suited for the task of intrinsic and extrinsic calibration of event cameras. The advantage of our proposed approach is that we can use standard calibration patterns that do not rely on active illumination. Furthermore, our approach enables the possibility to perform extrinsic calibration between frame-based and event-based sensors without additional complexity. Both simulation and real-world experiments indicate that calibration through image reconstruction is accurate under common distortion models and a wide variety of distortion parameters, Comment: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops

Once an academic venture, autonomous driving has received unparalleled corporate funding in the last decade. Still, the operating conditions of current autonomous cars are mostly restricted to ideal scenarios. This means that driving in challenging illumination conditions such as night, sunrise, and sunset remains an open problem. In these cases, standard cameras are being pushed to their limits in terms of low light and high dynamic range performance. To address these challenges, we propose, DSEC, a new dataset that contains such demanding illumination conditions and provides a rich set of sensory data. DSEC offers data from a wide-baseline stereo setup of two color frame cameras and two high-resolution monochrome event cameras. In addition, we collect lidar data and RTK GPS measurements, both hardware synchronized with all camera data. One of the distinctive features of this dataset is the inclusion of high-resolution event cameras. Event cameras have received increasing attention for their high temporal resolution and high dynamic range performance. However, due to their novelty, event camera datasets in driving scenarios are rare. This work presents the first high-resolution, large-scale stereo dataset with event cameras. The dataset contains 53 sequences collected by driving in a variety of illumination conditions and provides ground truth disparity for the development and evaluation of event-based stereo algorithms., Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters