Event Cameras Meet SPADs for High-Speed, Low-Bandwidth Imaging
<|reference_start|>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 ( > 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.<|reference_end|>
@article{muglikar2024event,
    title={Event Cameras Meet SPADs for High-Speed, Low-Bandwidth Imaging},
    author={Manasi Muglikar, Siddharth Somasundaram, Akshat Dave, Edoardo Charbon,
  Ramesh Raskar, Davide Scaramuzza},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.11511},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.11511},
    primaryClass={eess.IV cs.CV}
}