Bringing BNNs to Fast Event Processing

Abstract

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) enable efficient deep learning deployment on resource constrained devices with weights and activations compressed to one bit, substantially reducing model size and inference cost. Event cameras offer complementary advantages, including low latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, by capturing asynchronous streams of events rather than dense image frames. Despite their shared emphasis on efficiency, the combination of these technologies remains largely unexplored. This work aims at adapting and evaluating modern deep BNN architectures on event data. We also show that cross-modal pretraining from RGB data can improve the classification accuracy of BNNs on neuromorphic datasets. We introduce the Polar-wise Binary Event Volume (PBEV), a binary representation that enables event-camera data to be processed directly by BNNs and represents a step toward fully binarized event-based vision systems. Best evaluated BNN on N-Caltech101 classification benchmarks shows 90.58% accuracy with 7.5x less operations than their full-precision counterparts.