Towards Low-Latency Event-based Obstacle Avoidance on a FPGA-Drone

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bonazzi, Pietro, Vogt, Christian, Jost, Michael, Khacef, Lyes, Paredes-Vallés, Federico, Magno, Michele
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bonazzi, Pietro
Vogt, Christian
Jost, Michael
Khacef, Lyes
Paredes-Vallés, Federico
Magno, Michele
author_facet Bonazzi, Pietro
Vogt, Christian
Jost, Michael
Khacef, Lyes
Paredes-Vallés, Federico
Magno, Michele
contents This work quantitatively evaluates the performance of event-based vision systems (EVS) against conventional RGB-based models for action prediction in collision avoidance on an FPGA accelerator. Our experiments demonstrate that the EVS model achieves a significantly higher effective frame rate (1 kHz) and lower temporal (-20 ms) and spatial prediction errors (-20 mm) compared to the RGB-based model, particularly when tested on out-of-distribution data. The EVS model also exhibits superior robustness in selecting optimal evasion maneuvers. In particular, in distinguishing between movement and stationary states, it achieves a 59 percentage point advantage in precision (78% vs. 19%) and a substantially higher F1 score (0.73 vs. 0.06), highlighting the susceptibility of the RGB model to overfitting. Further analysis in different combinations of spatial classes confirms the consistent performance of the EVS model in both test data sets. Finally, we evaluated the system end-to-end and achieved a latency of approximately 2.14 ms, with event aggregation (1 ms) and inference on the processing unit (0.94 ms) accounting for the largest components. These results underscore the advantages of event-based vision for real-time collision avoidance and demonstrate its potential for deployment in resource-constrained environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10400
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Low-Latency Event-based Obstacle Avoidance on a FPGA-Drone
Bonazzi, Pietro
Vogt, Christian
Jost, Michael
Khacef, Lyes
Paredes-Vallés, Federico
Magno, Michele
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
This work quantitatively evaluates the performance of event-based vision systems (EVS) against conventional RGB-based models for action prediction in collision avoidance on an FPGA accelerator. Our experiments demonstrate that the EVS model achieves a significantly higher effective frame rate (1 kHz) and lower temporal (-20 ms) and spatial prediction errors (-20 mm) compared to the RGB-based model, particularly when tested on out-of-distribution data. The EVS model also exhibits superior robustness in selecting optimal evasion maneuvers. In particular, in distinguishing between movement and stationary states, it achieves a 59 percentage point advantage in precision (78% vs. 19%) and a substantially higher F1 score (0.73 vs. 0.06), highlighting the susceptibility of the RGB model to overfitting. Further analysis in different combinations of spatial classes confirms the consistent performance of the EVS model in both test data sets. Finally, we evaluated the system end-to-end and achieved a latency of approximately 2.14 ms, with event aggregation (1 ms) and inference on the processing unit (0.94 ms) accounting for the largest components. These results underscore the advantages of event-based vision for real-time collision avoidance and demonstrate its potential for deployment in resource-constrained environments.
title Towards Low-Latency Event-based Obstacle Avoidance on a FPGA-Drone
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10400