DVS-Voltmeter: Stochastic Process-Based Event Simulator for Dynamic Vision Sensors

Songnan Lin, Ye Ma, Zhenhua Guo, Bihan Wen

Abstract: Recent advances in deep learning for event-driven applications with dynamic vision sensors (DVS) primarily rely on training over simulated data. However, most simulators ignore various physics-based characteristics of real DVS, such as the fidelity of event timestamps and comprehensive noise effects. We propose an event simulator, dubbed DVS-Voltmeter, to enable high-performance deep networks for DVS applications. DVS-Voltmeter incorporates the fundamental principle of physics - (1) voltage variations in a DVS circuit, (2) randomness caused by photon reception, and (3) noise effects caused by temperature and parasitic photocurrent - into a stochastic process. With the novel insight into the sensor design and physics, DVS-Voltmeter generates more realistic events, given high frame-rate videos. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that the simulated events resemble real data. The evaluation on two tasks, i.e., semantic segmentation and intensity-image reconstruction, indicates that neural networks trained with DVS-Voltmeter generalize favorably on real events against state-of-the-art simulators.