  Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that naturally capture the
dynamics of a scene, filtering out redundant information. This paper presents a
deep neural network approach that unlocks the potential of event cameras on a
challenging motion-estimation task: prediction of a vehicle's steering angle.
To make the best out of this sensor-algorithm combination, we adapt
state-of-the-art convolutional architectures to the output of event sensors and
extensively evaluate the performance of our approach on a publicly available
large scale event-camera dataset (~1000 km). We present qualitative and
quantitative explanations of why event cameras allow robust steering prediction
even in cases where traditional cameras fail, e.g. challenging illumination
conditions and fast motion. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of
leveraging transfer learning from traditional to event-based vision, and show
that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms based on standard
cameras.
