Data-efficient Event Camera Pre-training via Disentangled Masked Modeling

In this paper, we present a new data-efficient voxel-based self-supervised learning method for event cameras. Our pre-training overcomes the limitations of previous methods, which either sacrifice temporal information by converting event sequences into 2D images for utilizing pre-trained image models or directly employ paired image data for knowledge distillation to enhance the learning of event streams. In order to make our pre-training data-efficient, we first design a semantic-uniform masking method to address the learning imbalance caused by the varying reconstruction difficulties of different regions in non-uniform data when using random masking. In addition, we ease the traditional hybrid masked modeling process by explicitly decomposing it into two branches, namely local spatio-temporal reconstruction and global semantic reconstruction to encourage the encoder to capture local correlations and global semantics, respectively. This decomposition allows our selfsupervised learning method to converge faster with minimal pre-training data. Compared to previous approaches, our self-supervised learning method does not rely on paired RGB images, yet enables simultaneous exploration of spatial and temporal cues in multiple scales. It exhibits excellent generalization performance and demonstrates significant improvements across various tasks with fewer parameters and lower computational costs.