An Approach to Distance Estimation with Stereo Vision Using Address-Event-Representation

• Published in: Neural Information Processing pp. 190 - 198
• Main Authors: Domínguez-Morales, M., Jimenez-Fernandez, A., Paz, R., López-Torres, M. R., Cerezuela-Escudero, E., Linares-Barranco, A., Jimenez-Moreno, G., Morgado, A.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2011
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: address-event-representation; co-design; distance calculation; FPGA; Hold&Fire; neuromorphic engineering; retina; spike; Stereo vision; VHDL
• ISBN: 364224954X; 9783642249549
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-24955-6_23

Image processing in digital computer systems usually considers the visual information as a sequence of frames. These frames are from cameras that capture reality for a short period of time. They are renewed and transmitted at a rate of 25-30 fps (typical real-time scenario). Digital video processing has to process each frame in order to obtain a result or detect a feature. In stereo vision, existing algorithms used for distance estimation use frames from two digital cameras and process them pixel by pixel to obtain similarities and differences from both frames; after that, depending on the scene and the features extracted, an estimate of the distance of the different objects of the scene is calculated. Spike-based processing is a relatively new approach that implements the processing by manipulating spikes one by one at the time they are transmitted, like a human brain. The mammal nervous system is able to solve much more complex problems, such as visual recognition by manipulating neuron spikes. The spike-based philosophy for visual information processing based on the neuro-inspired Address-Event-Representation (AER) is achieving nowadays very high performances. In this work we propose a two-DVS-retina system, composed of other elements in a chain, which allow us to obtain a distance estimation of the moving objects in a close environment. We will analyze each element of this chain and propose a Multi Hold&Fire algorithm that obtains the differences between both retinas.