  In recent years, dynamic vision sensors (DVS), also known as event-based
cameras or neuromorphic sensors, have seen increased use due to various
advantages over conventional frame-based cameras. Using principles inspired by
the retina, its high temporal resolution overcomes motion blurring, its high
dynamic range overcomes extreme illumination conditions and its low power
consumption makes it ideal for embedded systems on platforms such as drones and
self-driving cars. However, event-based data sets are scarce and labels are
even rarer for tasks such as object detection. We transferred discriminative
knowledge from a state-of-the-art frame-based convolutional neural network
(CNN) to the event-based modality via intermediate pseudo-labels, which are
used as targets for supervised learning. We show, for the first time,
event-based car detection under ego-motion in a real environment at 100 frames
per second with a test average precision of 40.3% relative to our annotated
ground truth. The event-based car detector handles motion blur and poor
illumination conditions despite not explicitly trained to do so, and even
complements frame-based CNN detectors, suggesting that it has learnt
generalized visual representations.
