Real-time event simulation with frame-based cameras (ROS1 wrapper)

This repository contains a ROS1 wrapper for the real-time event simulator library.

Citing

If you use this code in an academic context, please cite the following publication:

Paper: Real-time event simulation with frame-based cameras

Video: YouTube

Project: See here

@inproceedings{Ziegler2023icra,
	title = {Real-time event simulation with frame-based cameras},
	booktitle = {2023 {International} {Conference} on {Robotics} and {Automation} ({ICRA})},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	author = {Ziegler, Andreas and Teigland, Daniel and Tebbe, Jonas and Gossard, Thomas and Zell, Andreas},
	month = {may},
	year = {2023},
}

Using the code

Software requirements

This code has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS noetic.

Dependencies:

• OpenCV
• ROS Noetic
  • roscpp
  • prophesee_event_msgs
  • image_transport
  • cv_bridge
  • event_simulator

How to build

1. Source ROS source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash

2. Create a ROS workspace mkdir -p ~/event-simulator_ws/src

3. Clone repositories:

cd ~/event-simulator_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/cogsys-tuebingen/event_simulator.git src/event_simulator
cd src/event_simulator/
git submodule update --init --recursive
cd ../..
git clone https://github.com/cogsys-tuebingen/event_simulator_ros.git src/event_simulator_ros
git clone https://github.com/prophesee-ai/prophesee_ros_wrapper.git
cp -r prophesee_ros_wrapper/prophesee_event_msgs src/
rm -rf prophesee_ros_wrapper/
git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/usb_cam.git src/usb_cam

4. Build:

source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash
catkin config -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
catkin build

5. Run:

ROS node:

source devel/setup.bash
rosrun usb_cam usb_cam_node
rosrun event_simulator_ros event_simulator_ros

Note: event_simulator_ros expects frames in the /usb_cam/image_raw topic.

Using videos:

source devel/setup.bash
rosrun event_simulator_ros event_simulator_video --video /path/to/video --record_video

Note: Use --help to see all the options.

Calculate the timings:
source devel/setup.bash
rosrun event_simulator_ros event_simulator_timings --video /path/to/video

Note: Use --help to see all the options.

Parameters

• type: The event simulator type (possible options are difference_cpu, difference_gpu, sparse_cpu, sparse_gpu, dense_farneback_cpu, dense_farneback_gpu, dense_dis_lq, dense_dis_hq)
• publish_events: Set to True to publish the event stream
• publish_event_frames: Set to True to publish the accumulated event frames

Docker

In the docker folder, you will find Dockerfiles for setups with and without CUDA. When building the docker image, you will need metavision.list which you can get from Prophesee here.

Analysis

In the scripts folder, you can find a couple of helper scripts for the statistics experiments.

Config

A default config for the timing measurement can be found in the config folder.

License

This software is issued under the Apache License Version 2.0.