Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that offer several advantages, such as low latency, high-speed and high dynamic range, to tackle challenging scenarios in computer vision. This paper presents a solution to the problem of 3D reconstruction from data captured by a stereo event-camera rig moving in a static scene, such as in the context of stereo Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. The proposed method consists of the optimization of an energy function designed to exploit small-baseline spatio-temporal consistency of events triggered across both stereo image planes. To improve the density of the reconstruction and to reduce the uncertainty of the estimation, a probabilistic depth-fusion strategy is also developed. The resulting method has no special requirements on either the motion of the stereo event-camera rig or on prior knowledge about the scene. Experiments demonstrate our method can deal with both texture-rich scenes as well as sparse scenes, outperforming state-of-the-art stereo methods based on event data image representations.
@article{arxiv.1807.07429,
title = {Semi-Dense 3D Reconstruction with a Stereo Event Camera},
author = {Yi Zhou and Guillermo Gallego and Henri Rebecq and Laurent Kneip and Hongdong Li and Davide Scaramuzza},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.07429},
year = {2019}
}