Efficient Meshflow and Optical Flow Estimation from Event Cameras

Xinglong Luo, Ao Luo, Zhengning Wang, Chunyu Lin, Bing Zeng, Shuaicheng Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19198-19207

In this paper we explore the problem of event-based meshflow estimation a novel task that involves predicting a spatially smooth sparse motion field from event cameras. To start we generate a large-scale High-Resolution Event Meshflow (HREM) dataset which showcases its superiority by encompassing the merits of high resolution at 1280x720 handling dynamic objects and complex motion patterns and offering both optical flow and meshflow labels. These aspects have not been fully explored in previous works. Besides we propose Efficient Event-based MeshFlow (EEMFlow) network a lightweight model featuring a specially crafted encoder-decoder architecture to facilitate swift and accurate meshflow estimation. Furthermore we upgrade EEMFlow network to support dense event optical flow in which a Confidence-induced Detail Completion (CDC) module is proposed to preserve sharp motion boundaries. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show the exceptional performance and runtime efficiency (39x faster) of our EEMFlow model compared to recent state-of-the-art flow methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/boomluo02/EEMFlow.