CVPR and RSS have been going on last week and this week, which is a great opportunity to see what kinds of new developments are coming out. For example Google released a great blog post on self-supervised tracking via video colorization. CVPR obviously had more than a few papers / presentations focused around optical flow and tracking, but one thing I noticed was the use of event cameras.

What’s an event camera?

Event cameras are basically high-speed cameras with a twist: they achieve their high speed between frames (30-1000 microseconds) because they only record pixel intensity changes. Another side effect of this setup is that the cameras have extremely high dynamic range (they’re very sensitive to fluctuations in incoming light). Additionally you can imagine there are power savings as well.

Latest Event Camera Developments

State of the art seems to be ~128x128px with 30-1000usec latency. Research is doing things like using a self-supervised network to perceive extremely fast motions / motions in the dark.

They’re also being used to make better steering angle predictions in self driving cars: