On October 8, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., the 1st Portuguese Workshop on Neuromorphic Vision will take place. This will be the first national meeting dedicated to event cameras and event-based vision. The meeting is aimed at students, researchers and professionals in the field, with the goal of promoting the exchange of results and discussion of scientific and technological challenges, as well as strengthening connections between universities, research institutes and industry.

The workshop will take place in Auditorium A302, Building 4, at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, and will feature the participation of Professors Alexandre Bernardino (researcher at the Institute for Systems and Robotics), João Ascenso and Fernando Pereira (both researchers at Instituto de Telecomunicações). The event will include an opening keynote on the topic, a session dedicated to the research landscape in Portugal, and a panel discussion.

What are event cameras?

Instead of capturing full images at fixed intervals, event cameras asynchronously record changes in brightness as they occur, opening up new opportunities in robotics, autonomous systems, aerospace, industrial inspection, computational imaging and machine learning.

Advantages of using event cameras:

• Microsecond temporal resolution: capturing fast motion without motion blur.
• Extremely low latency: pixels respond to changes as they occur, rather than capturing images frame by frame.
• High dynamic range: reliable perception even under extreme lighting contrasts.
• Lower power consumption and data rates: only changes are recorded, producing sparse and efficient data streams.

Programme

10:00–11:00: "Event-Based Sensing for Space-Based Applications", with Scott McCloskey

11:00–11:30: Coffee break

11:30–12:30: Event-Based Vision in Portugal — Ongoing Research:

• "Human Attention Mechanisms for Robotics: From Concepts to Applications", with Alexandre Bernardino (Institute for Systems and Robotics / Instituto Superior Técnico)
• "Structuring and Encoding Event Data", with João Ascenso (Instituto de Telecomunicações / Instituto Superior Técnico)
• "Event Data Coding for Machine Intelligence", with Nuno Rodrigues (Instituto de Telecomunicações / University of Leiria and Oeste)
• "Event-Based Video Reconstruction and Enhancement", with Caroline Conti (Instituto de Telecomunicações / ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon)

12:30–13:00: Panel discussion: "Event-Based Vision Research, Applications and Collaboration", moderated by Fernando Pereira (Instituto de Telecomunicações / Instituto Superior Técnico)

About the session "Event-Based Sensing for Space-Based Applications", with Scott McCloskey

Event streams are sparse, capture a very high dynamic range and preserve fast changes without motion blur, making them well suited to space applications, where scenes are mostly static, lighting conditions are extreme and relative orbital motion is high.

The talk provides an overview of event-based sensors and then explores two space applications: star tracking using an event sensor pointed into deep space, and vehicle re-identification in remote sensing.

McCloskey leads the Computational Imaging group at Kitware and has coordinated large multi-organization research projects funded by agencies such as DARPA, IARPA and AFRL. He has served as a chair at conferences including WACV, CVPR and ICCV.