Event Cameras – An Evolution in Visual Data Capture

Over the past decade, camera technology has made gradual, and significant improvements thanks to the mobile phone industry. This has accelerated multiple industries, including Robotics. Today, Davide Scaramuzza discusses a step-change in camera innovation that has the potential to dramatically accelerate vision-based robotics applications. Davide Scaramuzza deep dives on Event Cameras, which operate fundamentally different from traditional cameras. Instead of sampling every pixel on an imaging sensor at a fixed frequency, the "pixels" on an event camera all operate independently, and each responds to changes in illumination. This technology unlocks a multitude of benefits, including extremely highspeed imaging, removal of the concept of "framerate", removal of data corruption due to having the sun in the sensor, reduced data throughput, and low power consumption. Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at both departments of Informatics (University of Zurich) and Neuroinformatics (joint between the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), where he directs the Robotics and Perception Group. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, using standard cameras and event cameras, and aims to enable autonomous, agile, navigation of micro drones in search-and-rescue applications. Davide Scaramuzza: Hi, thank you. Abate De Mey: So firstly, I'd like to give a little bit of background about why I reached out and invited you to the show today. So over the past few months, I've been working a lot with my team at fluid dev, where we've been building a platform, helping robotics companies scale. And while we were working with one of the companies on that platform, we were digging into a lot of open source VSLAM algorithms. Um, and we just kept running into your name as we were doing research and reading up on this. So I'm super excited to have you on today and I'd love to learn just a little bit more about yourself and what your team is doing.