Spatio-Temporal Pyramid Keypoint Detection With Event Cameras

Abstract

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors with diverse advantages, including high temporal resolution and minimal power consumption. Therefore, event cameras enjoy a wide range of applications in computer vision, among which event keypoint detection plays a vital role. However, repeatable event keypoint detection remains challenging because the lack of temporal inter-frame interaction leads to descriptors with limited temporal consistency, which restricts the ability to perceive keypoint motion. Besides, detectors learned at single scale features are not suitable for event keypoints with significant motion speed differences in high-speed scenarios. To deal with these problems, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Pyramid Keypoint Detection Network (STPNet) for event cameras via a temporally consistent descriptor learning (TCL) module and a spatially diverse detector learning (SDL) module. The proposed STPNet enjoys several merits. First, the TCL module generates temporally consistent descriptors for specific keypoint motion patterns. Second, the SDL module produces spatially diverse detectors for applications in high-speed motion scenarios. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmarks show that our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art event keypoint detection methods. Specifically, our STPNet can outperform the best event keypoint detection method by 0.21px in reprj. error on Event-Camera, 4% in IoU on N-Caltech101, 0.13px in reprj. error on HVGA ATIS Corner and 5.94% in matching accuracy on DSEC.