Low-Latency Machine Vision Based on a Neuromorphic Vision Sensor

Low-latency visual perception is essential for interactive machine vision on edge AI devices, but conventional frame-based image sensors impose frame period delays and generate dense image data that increase memory bandwidth and processing latency. Although Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVSs) are known to provide low latency, sparse output, and high dynamic range, these sensor-level properties do not automatically translate into practical application-level latency reduction on resource-constrained edge platforms. This paper presents a latency-driven sensing algorithm co-design approach for DVS-based low-latency machine vision. The main objective is to connect DVS sensor-level characteristics, event representations, task-dependent processing flows, and measured response times on mobile application processors. We first analyze latency requirements for three representative edge AI applications (i.e., person detection, gesture recognition, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)), which correspond to different latency regimes and processing structures. We then describe the DVS operating principle, pixel-level event latency, and readout latency, showing how asynchronous event generation reduces sensing delay and suppresses redundant static background information before algorithmic processing. In contrast to prior event camera studies that mainly optimize a single task or a specific event representation, this work evaluates three task-specific event processing systems on mobile processors. Person detection achieves 92 ms processing latency on Exynos 7570, gesture recognition based on event-driven 4-DoF motion estimation achieves 20 ms latency on Exynos 5422, and SLAM achieves 15.9 ms latency on Snapdragon 845. These results satisfy the practical latency targets of the corresponding applications and demonstrate that DVS-based sensing can provide not only sensor-level speed advantages but also system-level latency benefits for AIoT, mobile, robotics, and AR/VR machine vision systems.