Deep Learning for Event-based Vision: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarks

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that capture the per-pixel intensity changes asynchronously and produce event streams encoding the time, pixel position, and polarity (sign) of the intensity changes. Event cameras possess a myriad of advantages over canonical frame-based cameras, such as high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low latency, etc. Being capable of capturing information in challenging visual conditions, event cameras have the potential to overcome the limitations of frame-based cameras in the computer vision and robotics community. In very recent years, deep learning (DL) has been brought to this emerging field and inspired active research endeavors in mining its potential. However, the technical advances still remain unknown, thus making it urgent and necessary to conduct a systematic overview. To this end, we conduct the first yet comprehensive and in-depth survey, with a focus on the latest developments of DL techniques for event-based vision. We first scrutinize the typical event representations with quality enhancement methods as they play a pivotal role as inputs to the DL models. We then provide a comprehensive taxonomy for existing DL-based methods by structurally grouping them into two major categories: 1) image reconstruction and restoration; 2) event-based scene understanding 3D vision. Importantly, we conduct benchmark experiments for the existing methods in some representative research directions (eg, object recognition and optical flow estimation) to identify some critical insights and problems. Finally, we make important discussions regarding the challenges and provide new perspectives for motivating future research studies.