# Event Cameras Meet SPADs for High-Speed, Low-Bandwidth Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11511 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11511/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [Burst Denoising with Kernel Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02327/) (2017)
- [TimeLens: Event-based Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07286/) (2021)
- [Bringing a Blurry Frame Alive at High Frame-Rate with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10180/) (2018)
- [Time Lens++: Event-based Frame Interpolation with Parametric Non-linear Flow and Multi-scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17191/) (2022)
- [NAFSSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution Using NAFNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08714/) (2022)
- [Continuous-time Intensity Estimation Using Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00386/) (2018)
- [Handheld Mobile Photography in Very Low Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11336/) (2019)
- [How to Calibrate Your Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12362/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Intensity-Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras Using Manifold Regularisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06283/) (2016)
- [Deep Burst Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05790/) (2017)
- [Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00834/) (2024)
- [Dancing under the stars: video denoising in starlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04210/) (2022)
- [Multi-Bracket High Dynamic Range Imaging with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06622/) (2022)
- [An Asynchronous Kalman Filter for Hybrid Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05590/) (2020)
- [Quanta Burst Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11840/) (2020)
- [Shining light on the DVS pixel: A tutorial and discussion about biasing and optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04706/) (2023)
- [Feedback control of event cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00409/) (2021)
- [Passive Inter-Photon Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00059/) (2021)
- [An Asynchronous Linear Filter Architecture for Hybrid Event-Frame Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01159/) (2023)
- [Spline Sketches: An Efficient Approach for Photon Counting Lidar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07314/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Adaptive Keyframe Selection for Scalable 3D Scene Reconstruction in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23928/) (2025)
- [Learning to Remove Lens Flare in Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09016/) (2025)
- [Event-Based De-Snowing for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20901/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.