An end-to-end broad learning system for event-based object classification

Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors measuring brightness changes (referred to as an 'event') for each pixel independently, instead of capturing brightness images at a fixed rate using conventional cameras. Asynchronous event data mixed with noise information is challenging for event-based vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a broad learning network for object detection using the event data. The broad learning network consists of two distinct layers, a feature-node layer and an enhancement-node layer. Different to convolutional neural networks, the broad learning network can be extended by adding nodes into layers during training. We design a gradient descent algorithm to train network parameters, which creates an event-based broad learning network in an end-to-end manner. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models, specifically, because of the small scale and increased speed displayed by our model during training. This demonstrates the superiority of event cameras towards online training and inference.