evlib 0.9.0

An event camera processing library with a Rust backend and Python bindings, designed for scalable data processing with real-world event camera datasets.

Architecture

evlib keeps a thin Rust core and does all DataFrame work in Polars from Python:

• Rust (evlib._evlib) handles only what cannot be expressed as DataFrame operations: binary format parsing (EVT2/EVT3/EVT2.1, AEDAT, AER, HDF5 with the ECF codec), construction of the Polars frame from decoded primitives, and the dense scatter-add that builds RVT stacked-histogram representations.
• Python Polars handles all processing: loading filters, filtering (evlib.filtering), and representations (evlib.representations, evlib.rvt). Every query is a lazy Polars LazyFrame collected with a selectable engine, so the same code runs on the CPU streaming engine today and on the GPU via cudf-polars (collect(engine="gpu")) where CUDA is available.

evlib.load_events returns a LazyFrame and applies any time, spatial, or polarity filters as Polars expressions, so loading and filtering fuse into one GPU-collectable query.

Full documentation: https://tallamjr.github.io/evlib/

• Quick Start
  • What are Event Cameras?
  • Basic Usage
• Installation
• Documentation
• Examples
• Development
• Community & Support
• License

Quick Start

What are Event Cameras?

Event cameras (also called neuromorphic or dynamic vision sensors) operate asynchronously: each pixel independently reports brightness changes as they occur, rather than sampling frames at a fixed rate.

Each event is represented as a 4-tuple:

$$e = (x, y, t, p)$$

Where:

• $x, y \in \mathbb{N}$: Pixel coordinates
• $t \in \mathbb{R}^+$: Timestamp (microsecond precision)
• $p \in {-1, +1}$ or ${0, 1}$: Polarity (brightness change direction)

An event fires when the logarithmic brightness change exceeds a threshold:

$$\log(L(x,y,t)) - \log(L(x,y,t_{\text{last}})) > \pm C$$

where $C$ is the contrast threshold. This yields microsecond temporal resolution, 120 dB+ dynamic range, and data sparsity proportional to scene motion.

For a deeper introduction, see the user guide.

Basic Usage

import evlib

# Automatic format detection — returns a Polars LazyFrame
events = evlib.load_events("data/prophesee/samples/evt2/80_balls.raw")

df = events.collect(engine="streaming")
print(f"Loaded {len(df):,} events")
print(f"Resolution: {df['x'].max()} x {df['y'].max()}")
print(f"Duration:   {df['t'].max() - df['t'].min()}")

Chain Polars expressions for efficient filtering and representation extraction:

import evlib
import evlib.representations as evr
import polars as pl

events = evlib.load_events("data/prophesee/samples/hdf5/pedestrians.hdf5")

# Temporal + spatial + polarity filtering, lazily
filtered = events.filter(
    (pl.col("t").dt.total_microseconds() / 1_000_000).is_between(0.1, 0.5)
    & pl.col("x").is_between(100, 500)
    & (pl.col("polarity") == 1)
)

# Produce a stacked histogram ready for an RVT-style model
hist = evr.create_stacked_histogram(
    filtered.collect(),
    height=180, width=240,
    bins=5, window_duration_ms=50.0,
)

See the representations guide for voxel grids, time surfaces, and mixed density stacks.

Installation

# Basic install
pip install evlib

# With PyTorch integration
pip install evlib[pytorch]

From source (requires Rust nightly and maturin):

git clone https://github.com/tallamjr/evlib.git
cd evlib
uv venv --python 3.12 && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"
maturin develop                    # default minimal build
maturin develop --features hdf5    # opt-in HDF5 support (Linux/macOS)

HDF5 is opt-in on Linux/macOS and unavailable on Windows — use h5py directly for HDF5 I/O on Windows. Full details and platform-specific notes live in the installation guide.

Documentation

Complete documentation is published at https://tallamjr.github.io/evlib/:

• Quick Start
• Loading Data — formats, polarity encoding, streaming
• Event Representations
• Polars Preprocessing
• Performance Guide — benchmarks, memory monitoring, troubleshooting
• API Reference
• Platform Support

Examples

Runnable examples live in examples/:

python examples/simple_example.py
python examples/filtering_demo.py
python examples/stacked_histogram_demo.py

# Jupyter notebooks
pytest --nbmake examples/

Benchmarks and performance scripts live in benches/.

Development

# Tests
pytest                        # Python
cargo test                    # Rust
pytest --markdown-docs docs/  # doc examples

# Formatting / linting
black python/ tests/ examples/
cargo fmt
ruff check python/ tests/
cargo clippy -- -D warnings

See CONTRIBUTING and the architecture overview for design details.

Community & Support

• Issues: Report bugs and request features

License

MIT License — see LICENSE.md for details.