# EventTracer: Fast Path Tracing-based Event Stream Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (2019)
- [Spatio-Temporal Backpropagation for Training High-performance Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02609/) (2017)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08150/) (2018)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator: Event-based Data for Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry, and SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08336/) (2016)
- [SpikingJelly: An open-source machine learning infrastructure platform for spike-based intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16620/) (2023)
- [Optimal Conversion of Conventional Artificial Neural Networks to Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00476/) (2021)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [Temporal-wise Attention Spiking Neural Networks for Event Streams Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11711/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Event-Based Optical Flow with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01862/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Event-based Vision: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08890/) (2023)
- [Learning Monocular Dense Depth from Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08350/) (2020)
- [Spiking Deep Networks with LIF Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08829/) (2015)
- [Event-based Video Reconstruction via Potential-assisted Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10943/) (2022)
- [Event Based, Near Eye Gaze Tracking Beyond 10,000Hz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03577/) (2020)
- [EV-IMO: Motion Segmentation Dataset and Learning Pipeline for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07520/) (2019)
- [CED: Color Event Camera Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10772/) (2019)
- [BlinkFlow: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Event-based Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07716/) (2023)
- [Curriculum Learning for ab initio Deep Learned Refractive Optics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01089/) (2023)
- [V2CE: Video to Continuous Events Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08891/) (2023)
- [EVREAL: Towards a Comprehensive Benchmark and Analysis Suite for Event-based Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00434/) (2023)
- [Hybrid SNN-ANN: Energy-Efficient Classification and Object Detection for Event-Based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03423/) (2021)
- [EventAid: Benchmarking Event-aided Image/Video Enhancement Algorithms with Real-captured Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08220/) (2023)
- [LED: A Large-scale Real-world Paired Dataset for Event Camera Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19718/) (2024)
- [CodedEvents: Optimal Point-Spread-Function Engineering for 3D-Tracking with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09409/) (2024)
- [Fine-Tuning Surrogate Gradient Learning for Optimal Hardware Performance in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06211/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EVIS: Real-Time Event Camera Simulation with Multimodal Supervision in NVIDIA Isaac Sim](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08098/) (2026)
- [E-WAVE: Event-based Continuous Optical Flow via Warping-Aligned Visual Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34346/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Simulating event streams from 3D scenes has become a common practice in event-based vision research, as it meets the demand for large-scale, high temporal frequency data without setting up expensive hardware devices or undertaking extensive data collections. Yet existing methods in this direction typically work with noiseless RGB frames that are costly to render, and therefore they can only achieve a temporal resolution equivalent to 100-300 FPS, far lower than that of real-world event data. In this work, we propose EventTracer, a path tracing-based rendering pipeline that simulates high-fidelity event sequences from complex 3D scenes in an efficient and physics-aware manner. Specifically, we speed up the rendering process via low sample-per-pixel (SPP) path tracing, and train a lightweight event spiking network to denoise the resulting RGB videos into realistic event sequences. To capture the physical properties of event streams, the network is equipped with a bipolar leaky integrate-and-fired (BiLIF) spiking unit and trained with a bidirectional earth mover distance (EMD) loss. Our EventTracer pipeline runs at a speed of about 4 minutes per second of 720p video, and it inherits the merit of accurate spatiotemporal modeling from its path tracing backbone. We show in two downstream tasks that EventTracer captures better scene details and demonstrates a greater similarity to real-world event data than other event simulators, which establishes it as a promising tool for creating large-scale event-RGB datasets at a low cost, narrowing the sim-to-real gap in event-based vision, and boosting various application scenarios such as robotics, autonomous driving, and VRAR.