Ensemble-Based Event Camera Place Recognition Under Varying Illumination

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Joseph, Therese, Fischer, Tobias, Milford, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912822121725952
author Joseph, Therese
Fischer, Tobias
Milford, Michael
author_facet Joseph, Therese
Fischer, Tobias
Milford, Michael
contents Compared to conventional cameras, event cameras provide a high dynamic range and low latency, offering greater robustness to rapid motion and challenging lighting conditions. Although the potential of event cameras for visual place recognition (VPR) has been established, developing robust VPR frameworks under severe illumination changes remains an open research problem. In this paper, we introduce an ensemble-based approach to event camera place recognition that combines sequence-matched results from multiple event-to-frame reconstructions, VPR feature extractors, and temporal resolutions. Unlike previous event-based ensemble methods, which only utilise temporal resolution, our broader fusion strategy delivers significantly improved robustness under varied lighting conditions (e.g., afternoon, sunset, night), achieving a 57% relative improvement in Recall@1 across day-night transitions. We evaluate our approach on two long-term driving datasets (with 8 km per traverse) without metric subsampling, thereby preserving natural variations in speed and stop duration that influence event density. We also conduct a comprehensive analysis of key design choices, including binning strategies, polarity handling, reconstruction methods, and feature extractors, to identify the most critical components for robust performance. Additionally, we propose a modification to the standard sequence matching framework that enhances performance at longer sequence lengths. To facilitate future research, we will release our codebase and benchmarking framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ensemble-Based Event Camera Place Recognition Under Varying Illumination
Joseph, Therese
Fischer, Tobias
Milford, Michael
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Compared to conventional cameras, event cameras provide a high dynamic range and low latency, offering greater robustness to rapid motion and challenging lighting conditions. Although the potential of event cameras for visual place recognition (VPR) has been established, developing robust VPR frameworks under severe illumination changes remains an open research problem. In this paper, we introduce an ensemble-based approach to event camera place recognition that combines sequence-matched results from multiple event-to-frame reconstructions, VPR feature extractors, and temporal resolutions. Unlike previous event-based ensemble methods, which only utilise temporal resolution, our broader fusion strategy delivers significantly improved robustness under varied lighting conditions (e.g., afternoon, sunset, night), achieving a 57% relative improvement in Recall@1 across day-night transitions. We evaluate our approach on two long-term driving datasets (with 8 km per traverse) without metric subsampling, thereby preserving natural variations in speed and stop duration that influence event density. We also conduct a comprehensive analysis of key design choices, including binning strategies, polarity handling, reconstruction methods, and feature extractors, to identify the most critical components for robust performance. Additionally, we propose a modification to the standard sequence matching framework that enhances performance at longer sequence lengths. To facilitate future research, we will release our codebase and benchmarking framework.
title Ensemble-Based Event Camera Place Recognition Under Varying Illumination
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01968