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 improve 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 (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$> 5$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mo>></mml:mo><mml:mn>5</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="muglikar-ieq1-3576698.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> 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.

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