A neuromorphic smart camera for real-time 360°distortion-free panoramas

Abstract

This paper presents a novel neuromorphic camera system rotating at high-speed (1 to 4 rotations/sec) to acquire 360° panoramas in real-time by exploiting the high temporal resolution, the high dynamic range and the sparse visual information representation using a neuromorphic vision sensor with address-event (AE) signaling mounted on a high-speed mechanical rotation device. Contrary to state-of-the-art panorama cameras (e.g. rotational cameras or catadioptric cameras), this camera system can delivers several distortion-free 360° panoramas per second at constant image resolution and efficient edge extraction of the scene under real illumination conditions without any further computation. This camera system could establish new sensing capabilities in challenging applications such as real-time environmental awareness for robotics and surveillance. After introducing panorama systems and the neuromorphic dual-line dynamic vision sensor, the new camera concept is presented. A comparative analysis of this system with state-of-the art cameras is given. The concept, the camera design and resulting images using an existing 256 pixel line sensor are presented.