A Simple and Effective Point-based Network for Event Camera 6-DOFs Pose
  Relocalization
Hongwei Ren Jiadong Zhu Yue Zhou Haotian FU Yulong Huang Bojun Cheng
Event cameras exhibit remarkable attributes such as high dynamic range,
asynchronicity, and low latency, making them highly suitable for vision tasks
that involve high-speed motion in challenging lighting conditions. These
cameras implicitly capture movement and depth information in events, making
them appealing sensors for Camera Pose Relocalization (CPR) tasks.
Nevertheless, existing CPR networks based on events neglect the pivotal
fine-grained temporal information in events, resulting in unsatisfactory
performance. Moreover, the energy-efficient features are further compromised by
the use of excessively complex models, hindering efficient deployment on edge
devices. In this paper, we introduce PEPNet, a simple and effective point-based
network designed to regress six degrees of freedom (6-DOFs) event camera poses.
We rethink the relationship between the event camera and CPR tasks, leveraging
the raw Point Cloud directly as network input to harness the high-temporal
resolution and inherent sparsity of events. PEPNet is adept at abstracting the
spatial and implicit temporal features through hierarchical structure and
explicit temporal features by Attentive Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory
(A-Bi-LSTM). By employing a carefully crafted lightweight design, PEPNet
delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both indoor and outdoor
datasets with meager computational resources. Specifically, PEPNet attains a
significant 38% and 33% performance improvement on the random split IJRR and
M3ED datasets, respectively. Moreover, the lightweight design version
PEPNet$_{tiny}$ accomplishes results comparable to the SOTA while employing a
mere 0.5% of the parameters.