# EF-3DGS: Event-Aided Free-Trajectory 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15392/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [DONeRF: Towards Real-Time Rendering of Compact Neural Radiance Fields using Depth Oracle Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03231/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)
- [VastGaussian: Vast 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17427/) (2024)
- [SPARF: Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse and Noisy Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11738/) (2022)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [A Unifying Contrast Maximization Framework for Event Cameras, with Applications to Motion, Depth, and Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01306/) (2018)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [TimeLens: Event-based Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07286/) (2021)
- [Ultimate SLAM? Combining Events, Images, and IMU for Robust Visual SLAM in HDR and High Speed Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06310/) (2017)
- [NeRP: Implicit Neural Representation Learning with Prior Embedding for Sparsely Sampled Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10991/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [GS2E: Gaussian Splatting is an Effective Data Generator for Event Stream Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15287/) (2025)
- [A Survey of 3D Reconstruction with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08438/) (2025)
- [USP-Gaussian: Unifying Spike-based Image Reconstruction, Pose Correction and Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10504/) (2024)
- [VCR: Variance-Driven Channel Recalibration for Robust Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10975/) (2026)
- [GeoGuide: Hierarchical Geometric Guidance for Open-Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26260/) (2026)
- [GLASS: Geometry-aware Local Alignment and Structure Synchronization Network for 2D-3D Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26262/) (2026)
- [From Events to Enhancement: A Survey on Event-Based Imaging Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05488/) (2025)
- [Geometric-Photometric Event-based 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18640/) (2025)
- [Unbiased Gradient Estimation for Event Binning via Functional Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12590/) (2026)
- [Event-based Visual Deformation Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14376/) (2026)
- [VisionNVS: Self-Supervised Inpainting for Novel View Synthesis under the Virtual-Shift Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17382/) (2026)
- [FS-I2P:A Hierarchical Focus-Sweep Registration Network with Dynamically Allocated Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07607/) (2026)
- [GoStop: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Temporal Aggregation in Event-Based Feature Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15699/) (2026)
- [ERF-GS: Reconstructing Fast Motion from Disjoint Event-RGB Viewpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08531/) (2026)
- [Mask 2D-3D: Adaptive Dual-Masked Autoencoder Network for Image-to-Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18088/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scene reconstruction from casually captured videos has wide applications in real-world scenarios. With recent advancements in differentiable rendering techniques, several methods have attempted to simultaneously optimize scene representations (NeRF or 3DGS) and camera poses. Despite recent progress, existing methods relying on traditional camera input tend to fail in high-speed (or equivalently low-frame-rate) scenarios. Event cameras, inspired by biological vision, record pixel-wise intensity changes asynchronously with high temporal resolution, providing valuable scene and motion information in blind inter-frame intervals. In this paper, we introduce the event camera to aid scene construction from a casually captured video for the first time, and propose Event-Aided Free-Trajectory 3DGS, called EF-3DGS, which seamlessly integrates the advantages of event cameras into 3DGS through three key components. First, we leverage the Event Generation Model (EGM) to fuse events and frames, supervising the rendered views observed by the event stream. Second, we adopt the Contrast Maximization (CMax) framework in a piece-wise manner to extract motion information by maximizing the contrast of the Image of Warped Events (IWE), thereby calibrating the estimated poses. Besides, based on the Linear Event Generation Model (LEGM), the brightness information encoded in the IWE is also utilized to constrain the 3DGS in the gradient domain. Third, to mitigate the absence of color information of events, we introduce photometric bundle adjustment (PBA) to ensure view consistency across events and frames. We evaluate our method on the public Tanks and Temples benchmark and a newly collected real-world dataset, RealEv-DAVIS. Our project page is https://lbh666.github.io/ef-3dgs/.