Event Cameras Meet SPADs for High-Speed, Low-Bandwidth Imaging
Traditional cameras face a trade-off between low-light performance and high-speed imaging: longer exposure times to capture sufficient light results in motion blur, whereas shorter exposures result in Poisson-corrupted noisy images. While burst photography techniques help mitigate this tradeoff, conventional cameras are fundamentally limited in their sensor noise characteristics. Event cameras and single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensors have emerged as promising alternatives to conventional cameras due to their desirable properties. SPADs are capable of single-photon sensitivity with microsecond temporal resolution, and event cameras can measure brightness changes up to 1 MHz with low bandwidth requirements. We show that these properties are complementary, and can help achieve low-light, high-speed image reconstruction with low bandwidth requirements. We introduce a sensor fusion framework to combine SPADs with event cameras to improves the reconstruction of high-speed, low-light scenes while reducing the high bandwidth cost associated with using every SPAD frame. Our evaluation, on both synthetic and real sensor data, demonstrates significant enhancements ($\gt 5$ dB PSNR) in reconstructing low-light scenes at high temporal resolution (100 kHz) compared to conventional cameras. Event-SPAD fusion shows great promise for real-world applications, such as robotics or medical imaging.
Cite this item
Muglikar, M., Somasundaram, S., Dave, A., Charbon, E., Raskar, R., & Scaramuzza, D. (2025). Event Cameras Meet SPADs for High-Speed, Low-Bandwidth Imaging. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2025.3576698
Click Copy to copy the citation, or select the text manually.
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2025
1
12
REVIEWED
EPFL