Performance comparison of area-scan and event-based camera

Event-based sensors asynchronously measure pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode the time, location and sign of the brightness changes instead of  capturing images at a fixed rate, as conventional area-scan sensors do. Advantages of event-based sensors include: high temporal resolution and dynamic range (120 dB), low power consumption, and a compressed output stream. Comparison methodology between the two types of sensors is not available, therefore choosing between event-based and conventional  areascan camera for a given machine vision application is a challenge. We extended the dynamic range for the irradiance of the test equipment to 120 dB, characterized the  performance in relation to irradiance (photon/(pixel s)), emulated event-based sensor functionality with conventional area-scan sensor and thus enabled a comparison. Normal EMVA  1288 standard measurement suffice for emulation, provided the irradiance series is dense enough. Area-scan cameras which meet the linear model of the EMVA 1288 standard, require  no measurements, because it is possible to compute the emulated performance analytically. The comparison covers several area-scan cameras and three eventbased cameras with  different sensors.