Blurring for Clarity: Passive Computation for Defocus-Driven Parsimonious Navigation using a Monocular Event Camera

Hrishikesh Pawar, Deepak Singh, Nitin J Sanket; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2025, pp. 912-916

Navigation in cluttered unstructured scenes is crucial for deploying aerial robots in humanitarian applications. To enhance efficiency and extend operational times we propose a biologically inspired method called passive computation. By utilizing wave physics we extract depth cues from defocus instead of relying on costly explicit depth computation. We demonstrate this approach by using a large aperture lens to get a shallow depth of field on a monocular event camera enabling robust and parsimonious navigation through depth ordinality. The key idea is to optically "blur out" regions of disinterest minimizing computational demands. In simulation experiments our method achieved a success rate of 70% with over 62x computation savings compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Preliminary results on a real setup also show promise highlighting the potential of defocus in enhancing event-based navigation for aerial robots.