Detecting Stable Keypoints from Events through Image Gradient Prediction

We present a method that detects stable keypoints from an event stream at high speed with a low memory footprint. Our key observation connects two points: It should be easier to reconstruct the image gradients rather than the image itself from the events, and the Harris corner detector, one of the most reliable keypoint detectors for short baseline regular images, depends on the image gradients, not the image. We therefore introduce a recurrent convolutional neural network to predict image gradients from events. As image gradients and events are correlated, this prediction task is relatively easy and we can keep this network very small. We train our network solely on synthetic data. Extracting Harris corners from these gradients is then very efficient. Moreover, in contrast to learned methods, we can change the hyperparameters of the detector without retraining. Our experiments confirm that predicting image gradients rather than images is much more efficient, and that our approach predicts stable corner points which are easier to track for a longer time compared to state-of-the-art event-based methods.