Event cameras are emerging vision sensors and their advantages are suitable for various applications such as autonomous robots. Contrast maximization (CMax), which provides state-of-the-art accuracy on motion estimation using events, may suffer from an overfitting problem called event collapse. Prior works are computationally expensive or cannot alleviate the overfitting, which undermines the benefits of the CMax framework. We propose a novel, computationally efficient regularizer based on geometric principles to mitigate event collapse. The experiments show that the proposed regularizer achieves state-of-the-art accuracy results, while its reduced computational complexity makes it two to four times faster than previous approaches. To the best of our knowledge, our regularizer is the only effective solution for event collapse without trading off runtime. We hope our work opens the door for future applications that unlocks the advantages of event cameras.

Contrast maximization (CMax) is a framework that provides state-of-the-art results on several event-based computer vision tasks, such as ego-motion or optical flow estimation. However, it may suffer from a problem called event collapse, which is an undesired solution where events are warped into too few pixels. As prior works have largely ignored the issue or proposed workarounds, it is imperative to analyze this phenomenon in detail. Our work demonstrates event collapse in its simplest form and proposes collapse metrics by using first principles of space-time deformation based on differential geometry and physics. We experimentally show on publicly available datasets that the proposed metrics mitigate event collapse and do not harm well-posed warps. To the best of our knowledge, regularizers based on the proposed metrics are the only effective solution against event collapse in the experimental settings considered, compared with other methods. We hope that this work inspires further research to tackle more complex warp models.