A Color Event-Based Camera Emulator for Robot Vision

Event-based cameras are becoming increasingly popular due to their asynchronous spatial-temporal information, high temporal resolution, power efficiency, and high dynamic range advantages. Despite these benefits, the adoption of these sensors has been hindered, mainly due to their high cost. While prices are decreasing and commercial options exist, researchers and developers face barriers to addressing the potential of event-based vision, especially with more specialized models. Although accurate event-based simulators and emulators exist, their primary limitation lies in their inability to operate in real-time and in that they are designed only for grey-scale video streams. This limitation creates a gap between theoretical exploration and practical application, hindering the seamless integration of event-based systems into real-world applications, especially in robotics. Moreover, the importance of color information is well recognized for many tasks, and most existing event-based cameras do not handle color information, except for a few exceptions. To address this challenge, we propose a ROS-based color event camera emulator to aid in reducing the gap between the real-world applicability of event-based color cameras by presenting its software design and implementation. Finally, we present a preliminary evaluation to demonstrate its performance.