Event-intensity Stereo with Cross-modal Fusion and Contrast

For binocular stereo, traditional cameras excel in capturing fine details and texture information but are limited in terms of dynamic range and their ability to handle rapid motion. On the contrary, event cameras provide pixel-level intensity changes with low latency and a wide dynamic range, albeit at the cost of less detail in their output. It is natural to leverage the strengths of both modalities. We solve this problem by introducing a cross-modal fusion module that learns a visual representation from both sensor inputs. Additionally, we extract and compare dense event-intensity stereo pair features by contrasting “pairs of event-intensity pairs from different views and different modalities and different timestamps”. This provides the flexibility in masking hard negatives and enables networks to effectively combine event-intensity signals within a contrastive learning framework, leading to an improved matching accuracy and facilitating more accurate estimation of disparity. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our model and the improvement of disparity estimation accuracy.