EDeF-Net: Spatio-temporal Association Network for Flicker Removal in Event Streams

Event cameras with bio-inspired neuromorphic sensors are highly sensitive to brightness changes. When there are moving objects in a scene under constant lighting, event cameras only record motion information and output a sequence of events asynchronously. However, the common flickering light sources, such as fluorescent or LED lamps powered by alternating current exist in various real-world scenarios. When operating under a flickering light source, event cameras output numerous redundant event signals that are triggered by the flickering effect, which overwhelm the useful signals that encode motion information. In this paper, we propose EDeF-Net, an Event streams DeFlickering Network that effectively leverages the spatio-temporal correlation of event streams by modeling both the inter-channel temporal attention and inter-patch spatial attention. To facilitate network training and evaluation, we synthesize the first dataset containing paired flickering and flicker-free event streams. Moreover, we demonstrate that event streams filtered by EDeF-Net yield performance improvements on down-stream applications such as event-based optical flow estimation and object tracking.