Lossy Event Compression Based On Image-Derived Quad Trees And Poisson Disk Sampling

Event cameras have provided new opportunities for tackling visual tasks under challenging scenarios over conventional RGB cameras. However, not much focus has been given on event compression algorithms. The main challenge for compressing events is its unique asynchronous form. To address this problem, we propose a novel event compression algorithm based on a quad tree (QT) segmentation map derived from the adjacent intensity images. The QT informs 2D spatial priority within the 3D space-time volume. In the event encoding step, events are first aggregated over time to form polarity-based event histograms. The histograms are then variably sampled via Poisson Disk Sampling prioritized by the QT based segmentation map. Next, differential encoding and run length encoding are employed for encoding the spatial and polarity information of the sampled events, respectively, followed by Huffman encoding to produce the final encoded events. Our algorithm achieves greater than 6x higher compression compared to the state of the art.