arXiv subjects

Federico Paredes-Valles

Publications and source records attributed to Federico Paredes-Valles.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Realizing Fully-Integrated, Low-Power, Event-Based Pupil Tracking with Neuromorphic Hardware

Eye tracking is fundamental to numerous applications, yet achieving robust, high-frequency tracking with ultra-low power consumption remains challenging for wearable platforms. While event-based vision sensors offer microsecond resolution and sparse data streams, they have lacked fully integrated, low-power processing solutions capable of real-time inference. In this work, we present the first battery-powered, wearable pupil-center-tracking system with complete on-device integration, combining event-based sensing and neuromorphic processing on the commercially available Speck2f system-on-chip with lightweight coordinate decoding on a low-power microcontroller. Our solution features a novel uncertainty-quantifying spiking neural network with gated temporal decoding, optimized for strict memory and bandwidth constraints, complemented by systematic deployment mechanisms that bridge the reality gap. We validate our system on a new multi-user dataset and demonstrate a wearable prototype with dual neuromorphic devices achieving robust binocular pupil tracking at 100 Hz with an average power consumption below 5 mW per eye. Our work demonstrates that end-to-end neuromorphic computing enables practical, always-on eye tracking for next-generation energy-efficient wearable systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

TDE-3: An improved prior for optical flow computation in spiking neural networks

Motion detection is a primary task required for robotic systems to perceive and navigate in their environment. Proposed in the literature bioinspired neuromorphic Time-Difference Encoder (TDE-2) combines event-based sensors and processors with spiking neural networks to provide real-time and energy-efficient motion detection through extracting temporal correlations between two points in space. However, on the algorithmic level, this design leads to loss of direction-selectivity of individual TDEs in textured environments. Here we propose an augmented 3-point TDE (TDE-3) with additional inhibitory input that makes TDE-3 direction-selectivity robust in textured environments. We developed a procedure to train the new TDE-3 using backpropagation through time and surrogate gradients to linearly map input velocities into an output spike count or an Inter-Spike Interval (ISI). Our work is the first instance of training a spiking neuron to have a specific ISI. Using synthetic data we compared training and inference with spike count and ISI with respect to changes in stimuli dynamic range, spatial frequency, and level of noise. ISI turns out to be more robust towards variation in spatial frequency, whereas the spike count is a more reliable training signal in the presence of noise. We performed the first in-depth quantitative investigation of optical flow coding with TDE and compared TDE-2 vs TDE-3 in terms of energy-efficiency and coding precision. Results show that on the network level both detectors show similar precision (20 degree angular error, 88% correlation with ground truth). Yet, due to the more robust direction-selectivity of individual TDEs, TDE-3 based network spike less and hence is more energy-efficient. Reported precision is on par with model-based methods but the spike-based processing of the TDEs provides allows more energy-efficient inference with neuromorphic hardware.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

RGB-Event Fusion with Self-Attention for Collision Prediction

Ensuring robust and real-time obstacle avoidance is critical for the safe operation of autonomous robots in dynamic, real-world environments. This paper proposes a neural network framework for predicting the time and collision position of an unmanned aerial vehicle with a dynamic object, using RGB and event-based vision sensors. The proposed architecture consists of two separate encoder branches, one for each modality, followed by fusion by self-attention to improve prediction accuracy. To facilitate benchmarking, we leverage the ABCD [8] dataset collected that enables detailed comparisons of single-modality and fusion-based approaches. At the same prediction throughput of 50Hz, the experimental results show that the fusion-based model offers an improvement in prediction accuracy over single-modality approaches of 1% on average and 10% for distances beyond 0.5m, but comes at the cost of +71% in memory and + 105% in FLOPs. Notably, the event-based model outperforms the RGB model by 4% for position and 26% for time error at a similar computational cost, making it a competitive alternative. Additionally, we evaluate quantized versions of the event-based models, applying 1- to 8-bit quantization to assess the trade-offs between predictive performance and computational efficiency. These findings highlight the trade-offs of multi-modal perception using RGB and event-based cameras in robotic applications.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

From Soft Materials to Controllers with NeuroTouch: A Neuromorphic Tactile Sensor for Real-Time Gesture Recognition

This work presents NeuroTouch, an optical-based tactile sensor that combines a highly deformable dome-shaped soft material with an integrated neuromorphic camera, leveraging frame-based and dynamic vision for gesture detection. Our approach transforms an elastic body into a rich and nuanced interactive controller by tracking markers printed on its surface with event-based methods and harnessing their trajectories through RANSAC-based techniques. To benchmark our framework, we have created a 25 min gesture dataset, which we make publicly available to foster research in this area. Achieving over 91% accuracy in gesture classification, a 3.41 mm finger localization distance error, and a 0.96 mm gesture intensity error, our real-time, lightweight, and low-latency pipeline holds promise for applications in video games, augmented/virtual reality, and accessible devices. This research lays the groundwork for advancements in gesture detection for vision-based soft-material input technologies. Dataset: Coming Soon, Video: Coming Soon

cs.HC↗