  Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that capture per-pixel asynchronous
intensity change rather than the synchronous absolute intensity frames captured
by a classical camera sensor. Such cameras are ideal for robotics applications
since they have high temporal resolution, high dynamic range and low latency.
However, due to their high temporal resolution, event cameras are particularly
sensitive to flicker such as from fluorescent or LED lights. During every cycle
from bright to dark, pixels that image a flickering light source generate many
events that provide little or no useful information for a robot, swamping the
useful data in the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel linear filter to
preprocess event data to remove unwanted flicker events from an event stream.
The proposed algorithm achieves over 4.6 times relative improvement in the
signal-to-noise ratio when compared to the raw event stream due to the
effective removal of flicker from fluorescent lighting. Thus, it is ideally
suited to robotics applications that operate in indoor settings or scenes
illuminated by flickering light sources.
