Neuromorphic Synergy for Video Binarization
Shijie Lin Xiang Zhang Lei Yang Lei Yu Bin Zhou Xiaowei Luo Wenping Wang Jia Pan
Bimodal objects, such as the checkerboard pattern used in camera calibration,
markers for object tracking, and text on road signs, to name a few, are
prevalent in our daily lives and serve as a visual form to embed information
that can be easily recognized by vision systems. While binarization from
intensity images is crucial for extracting the embedded information in the
bimodal objects, few previous works consider the task of binarization of blurry
images due to the relative motion between the vision sensor and the
environment. The blurry images can result in a loss in the binarization quality
and thus degrade the downstream applications where the vision system is in
motion. Recently, neuromorphic cameras offer new capabilities for alleviating
motion blur, but it is non-trivial to first deblur and then binarize the images
in a real-time manner. In this work, we propose an event-based binary
reconstruction method that leverages the prior knowledge of the bimodal
target's properties to perform inference independently in both event space and
image space and merge the results from both domains to generate a sharp binary
image. We also develop an efficient integration method to propagate this binary
image to high frame rate binary video. Finally, we develop a novel method to
naturally fuse events and images for unsupervised threshold identification. The
proposed method is evaluated in publicly available and our collected data
sequence, and shows the proposed method can outperform the SOTA methods to
generate high frame rate binary video in real-time on CPU-only devices.