Low Cost and Latency Event Camera Background Activity Denoising

Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) event camera output includes uninformative background activity (BA) noise events that increase dramatically under dim lighting. Existing denoising algorithms are not effective under these high noise conditions. Furthermore, it is difficult to quantitatively compare algorithm accuracy. This paper proposes a novel framework to better quantify BA denoising algorithms by measuring receiver operating characteristics with known mixtures of signal and noise DVS events. New datasets for stationary and moving camera applications of DVS in surveillance and driving are used to compare 3 new low-cost algorithms: Algorithm 1 checks distance to past events using a tiny fixed size window and removes most of the BA while preserving most of the signal for stationary camera scenarios. Algorithm 2 uses a memory proportional to the number of pixels for improved correlation checking. Compared with existing methods, it removes more noise while preserving more signal. Algorithm 3 uses a lightweight multilayer perceptron classifier driven by local event time surfaces to achieve the best accuracy over all datasets. The code and data are shared with the paper as DND21.