Event Cameras versus Frame Cameras for Synthetic-Aperture Imaging: A Simulation Study

Jakob Hinterholzer, Mohamed Youssef, Oliver Bimber

Synthetic-aperture imaging (SAI) removes occluders such as foliage by integrating many views of a scene along a camera path. It has so far been used mainly with frame cameras. We ask whether an event camera has advantages for SAI, and answer the question in simulation, where both sensors see exactly the same scene and the same camera movement. A densely rendered Blender sequence is turned into frames with an EMVA~1288 noise model of an industrial global-shutter camera, and into an event stream with the v2e simulator parameterized like a Sony IMX636. The frames are integrated with the existing airborne optical sectioning renderer. For the events we add a new integration path that projects every single event onto the focal plane at its own interpolated pose, so no events have to be binned into frames. We compare the two sensors in three main runs and an additional dark high-speed test. In a bright scene at 25,m/s the frame camera records only three images on the path and cannot remove the occluder, while the event camera reconstructs the target, even after an event-rate controller drops most of its events to fit the camera link. At the same speed in a 5,lux scene the event camera…