Asynchronous Corner Detection and Tracking for Event Cameras in Real Time

TLDR

Event cameras, inspired by biological vision, provide high‑frequency, asynchronous streams that are robust to lighting changes and motion blur, yet most methods still discretize events into frames, limiting their full potential. This work introduces a purely event‑based corner detector and a novel corner tracker, aiming to detect and track corners directly on the event stream in real time. The proposed system processes events asynchronously, applying a corner detection algorithm followed by a tracker that operates continuously on the raw event stream without frame construction. Evaluation on benchmark datasets shows the approach detects more corners with higher repeatability than state‑of‑the‑art methods, achieves over a 4× speed‑up, and processes more than 7.5 million events per second, enabling high‑speed applications.

Abstract

The recent emergence of bioinspired event cameras has opened up exciting new possibilities in high-frequency tracking, bringing robustness to common problems in traditional vision, such as lighting changes and motion blur. In order to leverage these attractive attributes of the event cameras, research has been focusing on understanding how to process their unusual output: an asynchronous stream of events. With the majority of existing techniques discretizing the event-stream essentially forming frames of events grouped according to their timestamp, we are still to exploit the power of these cameras. In this spirit, this letter proposes a new, purely event-based corner detector, and a novel corner tracker, demonstrating that it is possible to detect corners and track them directly on the event stream in real time. Evaluation on benchmarking datasets reveals a significant boost in the number of detected corners and the repeatability of such detections over the state of the art even in challenging scenarios with the proposed approach while enabling more than a 4× speed-up when compared to the most efficient algorithm in the literature. The proposed pipeline detects and tracks corners at a rate of more than 7.5 million events per second, promising great impact in high-speed applications.