OpenESS: Event-based Semantic Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies

Event-based semantic segmentation (ESS) is a fundamental yet challenging task for event camera sensing. The difficulties in interpreting and annotating event data limit its scalability. While domain adaptation from images to event data can help to mitigate this issue there exist data representational differences that require additional effort to resolve. In this work for the first time we synergize information from image text and event-data domains and introduce OpenESS to enable scalable ESS in an open-world annotation-efficient manner. We achieve this goal by transferring the semantically rich CLIP knowledge from image-text pairs to event streams. To pursue better cross-modality adaptation we propose a frame-to-event contrastive distillation and a text-to-event semantic consistency regularization. Experimental results on popular ESS benchmarks showed our approach outperforms existing methods. Notably we achieve 53.93% and 43.31% mIoU on DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic without using either event or frame labels.