# Event-Based Motion Estimation via Oriented Distance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24223/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10428/) (2020)
- [The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator: Event-based Data for Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry, and SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08336/) (2016)
- [A Unifying Contrast Maximization Framework for Event Cameras, with Applications to Motion, Depth, and Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01306/) (2018)
- [Bringing a Blurry Frame Alive at High Frame-Rate with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10180/) (2018)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00167/) (2021)
- [Event-based Stereo Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15548/) (2020)
- [Event Based, Near Eye Gaze Tracking Beyond 10,000Hz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03577/) (2020)
- [DWDN: Deep Wiener Deconvolution Network for Non-Blind Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09962/) (2021)
- [Distance Surface for Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12680/) (2020)
- [A Unified Framework for Event-based Frame Interpolation with Ad-hoc Deblurring in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05191/) (2023)
- [Retina : Low-Power Eye Tracking with Event Camera and Spiking Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00425/) (2023)
- [EllSeg: An Ellipse Segmentation Framework for Robust Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09600/) (2020)
- [EventAid: Benchmarking Event-aided Image/Video Enhancement Algorithms with Real-captured Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08220/) (2023)
- [An N-Point Linear Solver for Line and Motion Estimation with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00842/) (2024)
- [Fast Event-based Double Integral for Real-time Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05925/) (2023)
- [Restoring Real-World Degraded Events Improves Deblurring Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20502/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event-based motion estimation is central to tasks that demand high temporal resolution and robustness to fast motion. Existing methods typically rely on iterative optimization or repeated hypothesis comparison, offsetting the sensor's low-latency advantage. We propose Oriented Distance Field Motion Estimation (ODF Motion Estimation), which replaces this optimization with a single averaging step over a precomputed field of event distance vectors, combined with an adaptive event-count selection strategy and a parameter-free trail filter. On public and self-collected datasets, ODF motion estimation reaches sub-pixel accuracy at the lowest latency among compared methods. We validate its generality on two downstream applications rather than treating them as separate contributions. First, the estimated trajectory is converted into a blur kernel and paired with a compact iterative-unfolding network, trained on simulated motion-estimation noise, for real-time non-blind image deblurring, attaining competitive or superior PSNR/SSIM with under 1M parameters. Second, the same precomputed field is repurposed for directional event filtering in a low-power asynchronous pupil and glint tracker, sustaining stable tracking for tens of seconds while lowering a near-eye module's power draw.