  Event cameras are a new type of sensors that are different from traditional
cameras. Each pixel is triggered asynchronously by event. The trigger event is
the change of the brightness irradiated on the pixel. If the increment or
decrement of brightness is higher than a certain threshold, an event is output.
Compared with traditional cameras, event cameras have the advantages of high
dynamic range and no motion blur. Accumulating events to frames and using
traditional SLAM algorithm is a direct and efficient way for event-based SLAM.
Different event accumulator settings, such as slice method of event stream,
processing method for no motion, using polarity or not, decay function and
event contribution, can cause quite different accumulating results. We
conducted the research on how to accumulate event frames to achieve a better
event-based SLAM performance. For experiment verification, accumulated event
frames are fed to the traditional SLAM system to construct an event-based SLAM
system. Our strategy of setting event accumulator has been evaluated on the
public dataset. The experiment results show that our method can achieve better
performance in most sequences compared with the state-of-the-art event frame
based SLAM algorithm. In addition, the proposed approach has been tested on a
quadrotor UAV to show the potential of applications in real scenario. Code and
results are open sourced to benefit the research community of event cameras.
