Memory Efficient Corner Detection for Event-Driven Dynamic Vision Sensors

Event cameras offer low-latency and data compression for visual applications, through event-driven operation, that can be exploited for edge processing in tiny autonomous agents. Robust, accurate and low latency extraction of highly informative features such as corners is key for most visual processing. While several corner detection algorithms have been proposed, state-of-the-art performance is achieved by "luvHarris". However, this algorithm requires a high number of memory accesses per event, making it less-than ideal for low-latency, low-energy implementation in tiny edge processors. In this paper, we propose a new event-driven corner detection implementation tailored for edge computing devices, which requires much lower memory access than lu-vHarris while also improving accuracy. Our method trades computation for memory access, which is more expensive for large memories. For a DAVIS346 camera, our method requires ≈ 3.8X less memory, ≈ 36.6X less memory accesses with only ≈ 2.3X more computes.