aedat4 support

[Tobias-Fischer]

Hi there,

I am wondering whether you plan to support the new aedat4 file format?

Many thanks, Tobias

[tobidelbruck]

AEDAT-3 or AEDAT-4 would be great, but will require a major refactoring of many core classes of jAER. The problem is that when jAER started with DVS we didn't anticipate that the stream might included stuff besides AER events from various sensors, where the entirety of the data was by timestamp/address (each 32 bits). Thus internally the raw data packet format is such int arrays. After the hardware interface or the AEFileInputStream, almost immediately the main animation loop cooks this RawPacket to a list of objects extending "BasicEvent". If I had to do it over again I would use rosbags or some other generic container type (but not HDF5; too fragile to corruption). For now the best short term way forward would be a python script that extracts DVS events (and maybe other things like IMU data and APS frames) from the AEDAT-4 file and writes them to the simple AEDAT-2 file format.  As far as I know, the utilities to work with AEDAT-3 and AEDAT-4 files are pretty much non-existent. But I'm open to ideas here.

[Tobias-Fischer]

I see, thanks for letting me know! Is there a Python script to write AEDAT-2 files from an event stream? Reading AEDAT-4 in python is trivial.

[tobidelbruck]

Maybe in https://github.com/SensorsINI/processAEDAT/tree/master/jAER_utils ? There are a LOT of scripts in this repo, but it is not very well organized or maintained now.  The matlab ones in misc date back to the earliest days of DVS when we developed an entire viewer/recording/playback framework in matlab for the DVS128, e.g. demo'ed at NIPS 2005 or 2006. The python stuff is more recent. People are certainly welcome to fork this and suggest pushes to help make it all better.

[tobidelbruck]

See https://github.com/SensorsINI/aedat4to2 to convert files to jAER AEDAT-2.0 format