A Joint Visual Compression and Perception Framework for Neuromorphic Spiking Camera

The advent of Neuromorphic spike cameras has garnered significant attention for their ability to capture continuous motion with unparalleled temporal resolution. However, this imaging attribute necessitates considerable resources for binary spike data storage and transmission. In light of compression and spike-driven intelligent applications, we present the notion of Spike Coding for Intelligence (SCI), wherein spike sequences are compressed and optimized for both bit-rate and task performance. Drawing inspiration from the mammalian vision system, we propose a dual-pathway architecture for separate processing of spatial semantics and motion information, which is then merged to produce features for compression. A refinement scheme is also introduced to ensure consistency between decoded features and motion vectors. We further propose a temporal regression approach that integrates various motion dynamics, capitalizing on the advancements in warping and deformation simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our scheme achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for spike compression and analysis. We achieve an average 17.25% BD-rate reduction compared to SOTA codecs and a 4.3% accuracy improvement over SpiReco for spike-based classification, with 88.26% complexity reduction and 42.41% inference time saving on the encoding side.