What is Event-Based Camera?

An event-based camera is a revolutionary vision sensor with three key advantages:

• a measurement rate that is almost 1 million times faster than standard cameras,
• a latency of 1 microsecond,
• and a high dynamic range of 120 decibels (standard cameras only have 60 dB).

These properties enable the design of a new class of algorithms to track a baseball in the moonlight, build a robot with the same agility of a fly, localizing and mapping in challenging lighting conditions. However, all these advantages come at a cost: an event camera does not provide the grayscale values of pixels but only changes in the luminance, and, because the output is composed by a sequence of events, traditional frame-based computer-vision algorithms are not applicable.

Reference

[1] http://www.rit.edu/kgcoe/iros15workshop/papers/IROS2015-WASRoP-Invited-04-slides.pdf