# Seeing Motion at Nighttime with an Event Camera

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11884/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Event-based Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08156/) (2018)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08245/) (2019)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Back to Event Basics: Self-Supervised Learning of Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras via Photometric Constancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08283/) (2020)
- [Time Lens++: Event-based Frame Interpolation with Parametric Non-linear Flow and Multi-scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17191/) (2022)
- [Event-based High Dynamic Range Image and Very High Frame Rate Video Generation using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08230/) (2018)
- [Semantic-Guided Zero-Shot Learning for Low-Light Image/Video Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00970/) (2021)
- [Event-based Video Reconstruction via Potential-assisted Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10943/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Unfolding Total Variation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00984/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Intensity-Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras Using Manifold Regularisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06283/) (2016)
- [EventGAN: Leveraging Large Scale Image Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01584/) (2019)
- [VECtor: A Versatile Event-Centric Benchmark for Multi-Sensor SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01404/) (2022)
- [EventSR: From Asynchronous Events to Image Reconstruction, Restoration, and Super-Resolution via End-to-End Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07640/) (2020)
- [Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11014/) (2022)
- [Low Light Video Enhancement using Synthetic Data Produced with an Intermediate Domain Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09187/) (2020)
- [Fast Enhancement for Non-Uniform Illumination Images using Light-weight CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00439/) (2020)
- [Thermal Infrared Image Colorization for Nighttime Driving Scenes with Top-Down Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14374/) (2021)
- [Utility and Feasibility of a Center Surround Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13076/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [EvLight++: Low-Light Video Enhancement with an Event Camera: A Large-Scale Real-World Dataset, Novel Method, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16254/) (2024)
- [Deblur e-NeRF: NeRF from Motion-Blurred Events under High-speed or Low-light Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17988/) (2024)
- [From Sim-to-Real: Toward General Event-based Low-light Frame Interpolation with Per-scene Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08090/) (2024)
- [Event Quality Score (EQS): Assessing the Realism of Simulated Event Camera Streams via Distances in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12515/) (2025)
- [CoSEC: A Coaxial Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08500/) (2024)
- [SEE: See Everything Every Time -- Adaptive Brightness Adjustment for Broad Light Range Images via Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21120/) (2025)
- [Dark-EvGS: Event Camera as an Eye for Radiance Field in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11931/) (2025)
- [Event Ellipsometer: Event-based Mueller-Matrix Video Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17313/) (2024)
- [V2V: Scaling Event-Based Vision through Efficient Video-to-Voxel Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16797/) (2025)
- [PEOD: A Pixel-Aligned Event-RGB Benchmark for Object Detection under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08140/) (2025)
- [From Sharp to Blur: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 2D Human Pose Estimation Under Extreme Motion Blur Using Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22438/) (2025)
- [Event Camera Guided Visual Media Restoration & 3D Reconstruction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09971/) (2025)
- [DSERT-RoLL: Robust Multi-Modal Perception for Diverse Driving Conditions with Stereo Event-RGB-Thermal Cameras, 4D Radar, and Dual-LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03685/) (2026)
- [EvRWKV: A Continuous Interactive RWKV Framework for Effective Event-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03184/) (2025)
- [Edge Intelligence with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14069/) (2025)
- [Seeing the Unseen: Zooming in the Dark with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02206/) (2026)
- [EventGait: Towards Robust Gait Recognition with Event Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22139/) (2026)
- [Event-Illumination Collaborative Low-light Image Enhancement with a High-resolution Real-world Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22186/) (2026)
- [EBS-EKF: Accurate and High Frequency Event-based Star Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20101/) (2025)
- [Bidirectional Image-Event Guided Fusion Framework for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06120/) (2025)
- [Event-RGB Fusion for Spacecraft Pose Estimation Under Harsh Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05698/) (2025)
- [BiEvLight: Bi-level Learning of Task-Aware Event Refinement for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04975/) (2026)
- [Semantic-E2VID: a Semantic-Enriched Paradigm for Event-to-Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17347/) (2025)
- [EvDiff: Event-Based Video Reconstruction using One-Step Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17492/) (2025)
- [EventSTU: Event-Guided Efficient Spatio-Temporal Understanding for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18920/) (2025)
- [Towards Closing the Domain Gap with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16178/) (2025)
- [NEC-Diff: Noise-Robust Event-RAW Complementary Diffusion for Seeing Motion in Extreme Darkness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20005/) (2026)
- [High-Quality and Efficient Turbulence Mitigation with Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20708/) (2026)
- [Dual-Exposure Imaging with Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10273/) (2026)
- [Frequency-domain Event-based Imaging for Selective Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15392/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We focus on a very challenging task: imaging at nighttime dynamic scenes. Most previous methods rely on the low-light enhancement of a conventional RGB camera. However, they would inevitably face a dilemma between the long exposure time of nighttime and the motion blur of dynamic scenes. Event cameras react to dynamic changes with higher temporal resolution (microsecond) and higher dynamic range (120dB), offering an alternative solution. In this work, we present a novel nighttime dynamic imaging method with an event camera. Specifically, we discover that the event at nighttime exhibits temporal trailing characteristics and spatial non-stationary distribution. Consequently, we propose a nighttime event reconstruction network (NER-Net) which mainly includes a learnable event timestamps calibration module (LETC) to align the temporal trailing events and a non-uniform illumination aware module (NIAM) to stabilize the spatiotemporal distribution of events. Moreover, we construct a paired real low-light event dataset (RLED) through a co-axial imaging system, including 64,200 spatially and temporally aligned image GTs and low-light events. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability on real-world nighttime datasets. The project are available at: https://github.com/Liu-haoyue/NER-Net.