IMAGE BESTWill event-cameras dominate computer vision?AMMJENACIONAL

Dr. Ryad Benosman, a professor at University of Pittsburgh believes a huge shift is coming to how we capture and process images in computer vision applications. He predicts that event-based (or, more broadly, neuromorphic) vision sensors are going to dominate in the future.

Dr. Benosman will be a keynote speaker at this year's Embedded Vision Summit. 

EETimes published an interview with him; some excerpts below.

According to Benosman, until the image sensing paradigm is no longer useful, it holds back innovation in alternative technologies. The effect has been prolonged by the development of high–performance processors such as GPUs which delay the need to look for alternative solutions.

“Why are we using images for computer vision? That’s the million–dollar question to start with,” he said. “We have no reasons to use images, it’s just because there’s the momentum from history. Before even having cameras, images had momentum.”

Benosman argues, image camera–based techniques for computer vision are hugely inefficient. His analogy is the defense system of a medieval castle: guards positioned around the ramparts look in every direction for approaching enemies. A drummer plays a steady beat, and on each drumbeat, every guard shouts out what they see. Among all the shouting, how easy is it to hear the one guard who spots an enemy at the edge of a distant forest?

“People are burning so much energy, it’s occupying the entire computation power of the castle to defend itself,” Benosman said. If an interesting event is spotted, represented by the enemy in this analogy, “you’d have to go around and collect useless information, with people screaming all over the place, so the bandwidth is huge… and now imagine you have a complicated castle. All those people have to be heard.”

“Pixels can decide on their own what information they should send, instead of acquiring systematic information they can look for meaningful information — features,” he said. “That’s what makes the difference.”

This event–based approach can save a huge amount of power, and reduce latency, compared to systematic acquisition at a fixed frequency.

“You want something more adaptive, and that’s what that relative change [in event–based vision] gives you, an adaptive acquisition frequency,” he said. “When you look at the amplitude change, if something moves really fast, we get lots of samples. If something doesn’t change, you’ll get almost zero, so you’re adapting your frequency of acquisition based on the dynamics of the scene. That’s what it brings to the table. That’s why it’s a good design.”

He goes on to admit some of the key challenges that need to be addressed before neuromorphic vision becomes the dominant paradigm. He believes these challenges are surmountable.

“The problem is, once you increase the number of pixels, you get a deluge of data, because you’re still going super fast,” he said. “You can probably still process it in real time, but you’re getting too much relative change from too many pixels. That’s killing everybody right now, because they see the potential, but they don’t have the right processor to put behind it.” 

“[Today’s DVS] sensors are extremely fast, super low bandwidth, and have a high dynamic range so you can see indoors and outdoors,” Benosman said. “It’s the future. Will it take off? Absolutely!”

“Whoever can put the processor out there and offer the full stack will win, because it’ll be unbeatable,” he added. 

Read the full article here: https://www.eetimes.com/a-shift-in-computer-vision-is-coming/