Deep Learning-based Event Data Coding: A Joint Spatiotemporal and Polarity Solution

Neuromorphic vision sensors, commonly referred to as event cameras, generate a massive number of pixel-level events, composed by spatiotemporal and polarity information, thus demanding highly efficient coding solutions. Existing solutions focus on lossless coding of event data, assuming that no distortion is acceptable for the target use cases, mostly including computer vision tasks such as classification and recognition. One promising coding approach exploits the similarity between event data and point clouds, both being sets of 3D points, thus allowing to use current point cloud coding solutions to code event data, typically adopting a two-point clouds representation, one for each event polarity. This paper proposes a novel lossy Deep Learning-based Joint Event data Coding (DL-JEC) solution, which adopts for the first time a single-point cloud representation, where the event polarity plays the role of a point cloud attribute, thus enabling to exploit the correlation between the geometry/spatiotemporal and polarity event information. Moreover, this paper also proposes novel adaptive voxel binarization strategies which may be used in DL-JEC, optimized for either quality-oriented or computer vision task-oriented purposes which allow to maximize the performance for the task at hand. DL-JEC can achieve significant compression performance gains when compared with relevant conventional and DL-based state-of-the-art event data coding solutions, notably the MPEG G-PCC and JPEG Pleno PCC standards. Furthermore, it is shown that it is possible to use lossy event data coding, with significantly reduced rate regarding lossless coding, without compromising the target computer vision task performance, notably event classification, thus changing the current event data coding paradigm.