Event cameras are a paradigm shift in camera technology. Instead of full frames, the sensor captures a sparse set of events caused by intensity changes. Since only the changes are transferred, those cameras are able to capture quick movements of objects in the scene or of the camera itself. In this work we propose a novel method to perform camera tracking of event cameras in a panoramic setting with three degrees of freedom. We propose a direct camera tracking formulation, similar to state-of-the-art in visual odometry. We show that the minimal information needed for simultaneous tracking and mapping is the spatial position of events, without using the appearance of the imaged scene point. We verify the robustness to fast camera movements and dynamic objects in the scene on a recently proposed dataset [18] and self-recorded sequences.

We propose a method for dense three-dimensional surface reconstruction that leverages the strengths of shape-based approaches, by imposing regularization that respects the geometry of the surface, and the strength of depth-map-based stereo, by avoiding costly computation of surface topology. The result is a near real-time variational reconstruction algorithm free of the staircasing artifacts that affect depth-map and plane-sweeping approaches. This is made possible by exploiting the gauge ambiguity to design a novel representation of the regularizer that is linear in the parameters and hence amenable to be optimized with state-of-the-art primal-dual numerical schemes.

We present a novel system that is capable of generating live dense volumetric reconstructions based on input from a micro aerial vehicle. The distributed reconstruction pipeline is based on state-of-the-art approaches to visual SLAM and variational depth map fusion, and is designed to exploit the individual capabilities of the system components. Results are visualized in real-time on a tablet interface, which gives the user the opportunity to interact. We demonstrate the performance of our approach by capturing several indoor and outdoor scenes on-the-fly and by evaluating our results with respect to a ground-truth model.