用事件相机+编码光栅+红外投影,让小型无人机在全黑中实时导航。
NightSight: Passive Computation for Navigation in Dark Using Events

- 通过编码光栅与红外点阵生成深度相关的模糊图样,隐式编码场景结构。
- 仅用平面墙合成数据训练,零样本泛化到复杂真实场景,2.5米内误差仅2.80%。
- 系统在Jetson Orin Nano上实时运行(20Hz),适合资源受限的小型无人机。
小型飞行机器人因灵活性高、成本低,特别适合在狭窄危险环境中执行搜救任务,但其在完全黑暗下实现自主导航仍面临挑战,因其难以搭载高功耗、大算力的感知系统。本文提出一种轻量级感知方法,结合单目事件相机、编码孔径镜头和红外点阵投影仪,实现黑暗环境下的导航。投影图案经编码孔径成像后,产生随深度变化的模糊特征,隐式编码场景几何信息。我们仅使用简单平面墙生成的合成数据,训练卷积神经网络解码这些特征以获得稠密深度图。尽管训练方式极为简化,模型仍可零样本泛化至复杂真实场景。系统在NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano上实现实时运行(20 Hz),证明其适用于资源受限平台。我们进一步分析不同编码孔径设计对深度估计性能的影响。结果表明,在2.5米范围内,平均绝对误差为7.0厘米,相对误差2.80%,展示了结构光照、编码光学与事件传感融合在黑暗环境下实现鲁棒感知与导航的巨大潜力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Small aerial robots are particularly well-suited for search and rescue in confined and hazardous environments due to their agility, low cost, and ability to traverse through cluttered spaces that are inaccessible to larger platforms. However, enabling autonomous navigation in complete darkness remains a significant challenge, because small aerial robots cannot easily accommodate perception systems that demand substantial payload, power, or computation. In this work, we present a lightweight perception approach that combines a monocular event camera, a coded aperture lens, and an infrared dot projector to enable navigation in such conditions. The projected pattern, when imaged through the coded aperture, produces depth dependent blur signatures that implicitly encode scene geometry. We train a convolutional neural network to decode these signatures into dense depth maps using only synthetic data generated from a simple planar wall setup. Despite this minimal training regime, the model generalizes zero-shot to complex real-world scenes. Our system operates in real time at 20 Hz on a NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, demonstrating suitability for resource-constrained platforms. We further analyze the impact of different coded aperture designs on depth estimation performance. Our approach gives high accuracy (l1 error 7.0cm) upto 2.5m range (2.80% error). These results highlight the potential of combining structured illumination, coded optics, and event-based sensing for enabling robust perception and navigation in complete darkness.
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