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Rodrigo Verschae

Publications and source records attributed to Rodrigo Verschae.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

eBIRD: Event-based Intensity Image Reconstruction Using Controllable Diffusion Models

Intensity-image reconstruction from event streams remains a challenging problem due to the binary, sparse, and asynchronous nature of event data. This work proposes eBIRD, an event-guided reconstruction framework that combines a DDPM with ControlNet-based conditioning. We analyze generic and specialized diffusion learning strategies for handwritten digit (N-MNIST) and face (RGBE-Gaze) reconstruction using 33ms event windows. On N-MNIST, the general model achieves the best reconstruction quality (MSE 0.0052, SSIM 0.8982, PSNR 23.34dB), whereas the specialized model performs best on RGBE-Gaze (MSE 0.0161, SSIM 0.7605, PSNR 19.08dB). These preliminary results suggest that controllable diffusion models are a promising approach for event-guided intensity-image reconstruction, while highlighting that the preferred learning strategy depends on the reconstruction domain.

cs.CV

EsaacSim: A Multimodal Event Camera Add-on for NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Event-based vision is becoming an increasingly important sensing paradigm for robotics, yet its adoption remains limited by sensor availability and the lack of integrated simulation tools for modern robotics platforms. This paper presents EsaacSim, a multimodal event camera add-on for NVIDIA Isaac Sim that enables online simulation of configurable event cameras with grayscale and Bayer RGGB event generation. The framework supports multiple event camera resolutions and provides synchronized RGB, APS, event, depth, and IMU outputs through native ROS2 interfaces. A motion-guided frame-gap synthesis strategy further increases the effective temporal resolution while preserving compatibility with the Isaac Sim rendering pipeline. Experimental evaluation demonstrates synchronized multimodal simulation across representative robotic scenes and efficient online performance over five event camera resolutions at effective event rates from 240 to 960Hz. Event stream generation requires 6.98--27.28ms for grayscale events and 7.58--29.16ms for Bayer RGGB events while using less than 400MB of additional GPU memory on an NVIDIA RTX~4060 GPU. These results show that EsaacSim enables supports online multimodal event-camera simulation for robotics research and synthetic data generation. We release an early version of the simulator and report its current architecture and performance.

cs.RO

Generalization Limits in Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification focuses on retrieving images of the same vehicle from a gallery given a query image. Upon closer inspection of commonly used datasets, we observe that vehicles with few visual differences-e.g., the same make, model, and color-appear in both the training and test sets. As a result, methods that effectively memorize the training data tend to perform well on these test sets but struggle to generalize to other datasets. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel evaluation approach that more effectively measures generalization capability to unseen vehicle types. To further study generalization performance, we also propose splitting the evaluation based on view, allowing us to differentiate the effect of viewpoint robustness from that of same-view re-identification. Our findings reveal that most state-of-the-art methods struggle with unseen vehicle types, and that their robustness to viewpoint changes and attention to detail are limited to vehicle types seen during training.

cs.CV

Event-based Liveness Detection using Temporal Ocular Dynamics: An Exploratory Approach

Face liveness detection has been extensively studied using RGB cameras, achieving strong performance under controlled conditions but often failing to generalize across sensors and attack scenarios. In this work, we explore event cameras as an alternative sensing modality for liveness detection based on temporal ocular dynamics. Event cameras capture sparse, asynchronous changes in brightness with microsecond resolution, enabling precise analysis of fast eye movements such as saccades. Replay attacks cannot faithfully reproduce these dynamics due to temporal resampling and display artifacts, leading to distinctive spatio-temporal patterns in the event domain. We design a data collection protocol to extend RGBE-Gaze with replay-attack recordings, yielding an event-based fake counterpart for liveness detection. We analyze event-driven temporal features from eye regions and evaluate their effectiveness for ocular motion segmentation and liveness classification. Our results show that event-based representations enable reliable discrimination between genuine and replayed sequences, achieving up to 95.37% top-1 accuracy with a spiking convolutional neural network. These preliminary findings highlight the potential of event-based sensing for robust and low-latency liveness detection.

cs.CV

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Dynamics in Event-based Facial Micro-Expression Analysis

Micro-expression analysis has applications in domains such as Human-Robot Interaction and Driver Monitoring Systems. Accurately capturing subtle and fast facial movements remains difficult when relying solely on RGB cameras, due to limitations in temporal resolution and sensitivity to motion blur. Event cameras offer an alternative, with microsecond-level precision, high dynamic range, and low latency. However, public datasets featuring event-based recordings of Action Units are still scarce. In this work, we introduce a novel, preliminary multi-resolution and multi-modal micro-expression dataset recorded with synchronized RGB and event cameras under variable lighting conditions. Two baseline tasks are evaluated to explore the spatial-temporal dynamics of micro-expressions: Action Unit classification using Spiking Neural Networks (51.23\% accuracy with events vs. 23.12\% with RGB), and frame reconstruction using Conditional Variational Autoencoders, achieving SSIM = 0.8513 and PSNR = 26.89 dB with high-resolution event input. These promising results show that event-based data can be used for micro-expression recognition and frame reconstruction.

cs.CV

evTransFER: A Transfer Learning Framework for Event-based Facial Expression Recognition

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture pixel intensity changes with microsecond latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range, providing information on the spatiotemporal dynamics of a scene. We propose evTransFER, a transfer learning-based framework for facial expression recognition using event-based cameras. The main contribution is a feature extractor designed to encode facial spatiotemporal dynamics, built by training an adversarial generative method on facial reconstruction and transferring the encoder weights to the facial expression recognition system. We demonstrate that the proposed transfer learning method improves facial expression recognition compared to training a network from scratch. We propose an architecture that incorporates an LSTM to capture longer-term facial expression dynamics and introduces a new event-based representation called TIE. We evaluated the framework using both the synthetic event-based facial expression database e-CK+ and the real neuromorphic dataset NEFER. On e-CK+, evTransFER achieved a recognition rate of 93.6\%, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. For NEFER, which comprises event sequence with real sensor noise and sparse activity, the proposed transfer learning strategy achieved an accuracy of up to 76.7\%. In both datasets, the outcomes surpassed current methodologies and exceeded results when compared with models trained from scratch.

cs.CV

Human-Robot Navigation using Event-based Cameras and Reinforcement Learning

This work introduces a robot navigation controller that combines event cameras and other sensors with reinforcement learning to enable real-time human-centered navigation and obstacle avoidance. Unlike conventional image-based controllers, which operate at fixed rates and suffer from motion blur and latency, this approach leverages the asynchronous nature of event cameras to process visual information over flexible time intervals, enabling adaptive inference and control. The framework integrates event-based perception, additional range sensing, and policy optimization via Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, with an initial imitation learning phase to improve sample efficiency. Promising results are achieved in simulated environments, demonstrating robust navigation, pedestrian following, and obstacle avoidance. A demo video is available at the project website.

cs.CV

Deep Photovoltaic Nowcasting

Predicting the short-term power output of a photovoltaic panel is an important task for the efficient management of smart grids. Short-term forecasting at the minute scale, also known as nowcasting, can benefit from sky images captured by regular cameras and installed close to the solar panel. However, estimating the weather conditions from these images---sun intensity, cloud appearance and movement, etc.---is a very challenging task that the community has yet to solve with traditional computer vision techniques. In this work, we propose to learn the relationship between sky appearance and the future photovoltaic power output using deep learning. We train several variants of convolutional neural networks which take historical photovoltaic power values and sky images as input and estimate photovoltaic power in a very short term future. In particular, we compare three different architectures based on: a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), a convolutional neural network (CNN), and a long short term memory (LSTM) module. We evaluate our approach quantitatively on a dataset of photovoltaic power values and corresponding images gathered in Kyoto, Japan. Our experiments reveal that the MLP network, already used similarly in previous work, achieves an RMSE skill score of 7% over the commonly-used persistence baseline on the 1-minute future photovoltaic power prediction task. Our CNN-based network improves upon this with a 12% skill score. In contrast, our LSTM-based model, which can learn the temporal dependencies in the data, achieves a 21% RMSE skill score, thus outperforming all other approaches.

cs.CV