提出两种事件流压缩方法,用新指标预测任务性能下降。
Lossy Event Compression: From Event Stream Distortion to Task Performance

- 将事件流转为极性直方图帧或点云,分别用JPEG 2000和G-PCC压缩
- 五种分类误差度量可准确预测不同压缩下的任务性能损失
- 适合做事件相机数据编码优化的研究者与工程师
事件相机以微秒级时间分辨率生成异步稀疏数据流,但在中高运动场景下每秒可产生多达数亿个事件,带来显著带宽与存储挑战。有损压缩对实际部署至关重要,但现有事件流失真度量无法可靠预测压缩导致的任务性能退化,迫使编解码器优化依赖昂贵的任务特定评估。本文提出两种根本不同的事件压缩流程:其一为基于聚合的流程,将事件流转换为极性直方图帧,使用传统图像编码器JPEG 2000进行压缩;其二为无帧点云流程,将事件原生编码为3D点云,采用基于八叉树的编解码器G-PCC。两者均在统一的任务驱动评估框架下评估,关联事件流失真与四项代表性任务的性能表现:视频重建、目标检测、光流估计,以及延迟敏感的参考相对协议下的异步特征追踪。在此框架基础上,首次应用五种基于分类的失真度量于事件压缩,与现有事件流度量进行对比。实验结果表明,所提度量能可靠预测不同编码框架下的任务性能退化,证明事件流失真评估可作为重复任务特定评估的高效替代,为未来事件数据编码方案的开发与优化提供直接指导。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Event cameras generate asynchronous, sparse data streams with microsecond temporal resolution, but in moderate-to-high motion scenes they can produce as many as hundreds of millions of events per second, creating significant bandwidth and storage challenges. Lossy compression is therefore essential for practical deployment, yet existing event stream distortion metrics fail to reliably predict compression-induced degradation at the task level, forcing codec optimization to rely on expensive task-specific evaluations. To address this gap, this paper introduces two fundamentally different event compression pipelines: i) an aggregation-based pipeline that converts the event stream into polarity-based histogram frames for compression with the conventional image codec JPEG 2000, and ii) a frame-free point cloud-based pipeline that codes events natively as 3D points using the octree-based codec G-PCC. Both pipelines are then assessed within a unified task-driven evaluation framework that relates event stream distortion to downstream application performance across four representative tasks: i) video reconstruction, ii) object detection, iii) optical flow estimation, and a delay-sensitive task iv) asynchronous feature tracking under a reference-relative protocol. Building on this framework, five classification-based distortion metrics are applied to event compression for the first time, to the best of the authors' knowledge, and benchmarked against existing event stream metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metrics reliably predict compression-induced task degradation across different coding frameworks. This demonstrates that event stream distortion assessment can be an efficient alternative to repeated task-specific evaluation, providing direct guidance for the development and optimization of future event data coding solutions.
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