DERD-Net: Learning Depth from Event-based Ray Densities

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Hauptverfasser: Hitzges, Diego, Ghosh, Suman, Gallego, Guillermo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hitzges, Diego
Ghosh, Suman
Gallego, Guillermo
author_facet Hitzges, Diego
Ghosh, Suman
Gallego, Guillermo
contents Event cameras offer a promising avenue for multi-view stereo depth estimation and Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) due to their ability to detect blur-free 3D edges at high-speed and over broad illumination conditions. However, traditional deep learning frameworks designed for conventional cameras struggle with the asynchronous, stream-like nature of event data, as their architectures are optimized for discrete, image-like inputs. We propose a scalable, flexible and adaptable framework for pixel-wise depth estimation with event cameras in both monocular and stereo setups. The 3D scene structure is encoded into disparity space images (DSIs), representing spatial densities of rays obtained by back-projecting events into space via known camera poses. Our neural network processes local subregions of the DSIs combining 3D convolutions and a recurrent structure to recognize valuable patterns for depth prediction. Local processing enables fast inference with full parallelization and ensures constant ultra-low model complexity and memory costs, regardless of camera resolution. Experiments on standard benchmarks (MVSEC and DSEC datasets) demonstrate unprecedented effectiveness: (i) using purely monocular data, our method achieves comparable results to existing stereo methods; (ii) when applied to stereo data, it strongly outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, reducing the mean absolute error by at least 42%; (iii) our method also allows for increases in depth completeness by more than 3-fold while still yielding a reduction in median absolute error of at least 30%. Given its remarkable performance and effective processing of event-data, our framework holds strong potential to become a standard approach for using deep learning for event-based depth estimation and SLAM. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/DERD-Net
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_15863
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DERD-Net: Learning Depth from Event-based Ray Densities
Hitzges, Diego
Ghosh, Suman
Gallego, Guillermo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
Signal Processing
Event cameras offer a promising avenue for multi-view stereo depth estimation and Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) due to their ability to detect blur-free 3D edges at high-speed and over broad illumination conditions. However, traditional deep learning frameworks designed for conventional cameras struggle with the asynchronous, stream-like nature of event data, as their architectures are optimized for discrete, image-like inputs. We propose a scalable, flexible and adaptable framework for pixel-wise depth estimation with event cameras in both monocular and stereo setups. The 3D scene structure is encoded into disparity space images (DSIs), representing spatial densities of rays obtained by back-projecting events into space via known camera poses. Our neural network processes local subregions of the DSIs combining 3D convolutions and a recurrent structure to recognize valuable patterns for depth prediction. Local processing enables fast inference with full parallelization and ensures constant ultra-low model complexity and memory costs, regardless of camera resolution. Experiments on standard benchmarks (MVSEC and DSEC datasets) demonstrate unprecedented effectiveness: (i) using purely monocular data, our method achieves comparable results to existing stereo methods; (ii) when applied to stereo data, it strongly outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches, reducing the mean absolute error by at least 42%; (iii) our method also allows for increases in depth completeness by more than 3-fold while still yielding a reduction in median absolute error of at least 30%. Given its remarkable performance and effective processing of event-data, our framework holds strong potential to become a standard approach for using deep learning for event-based depth estimation and SLAM. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/DERD-Net
title DERD-Net: Learning Depth from Event-based Ray Densities
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Robotics
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15863