NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of NTIRE 2025 the First Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring, detailing the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary goal of the challenge is to design an event-based method that achieves high-quality image deblurring, with performance quantitatively assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Notably, there are no restrictions on computational complexity or model size. The task focuses on leveraging both events and images as inputs for single-image deblurring. A total of 199 participants registered, among whom 15 teams successfully submitted valid results, offering valuable insights into the current state of event-based image deblurring. We anticipate that this challenge will drive further advancements in event-based vision research.

Super-Resolving Blurry Images with Events

Super-resolution from motion-blurred images poses a significant challenge due to the combined effects of motion blur and low spatial resolution. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an Event-based Blurry Super Resolution Network (EBSR-Net), which leverages the high temporal resolution of events to mitigate motion blur and improve high-resolution image prediction. Specifically, we propose a multi-scale center-surround event representation to fully capture motion and texture information inherent in events. Additionally, we design a symmetric cross-modal attention module to fully exploit the complementarity between blurry images and events. Furthermore, we introduce an intermodal residual group composed of several residual dense Swin Transformer blocks, each incorporating multiple Swin Transformer layers and a residual connection, to extract global context and facilitate inter-block feature aggregation. Extensive experiments show that our method compares favorably against state-of-the-art approaches and achieves remarkable performance.

Learning Monocular Depth from Focus with Event Focal Stack

Depth from Focus estimates depth by determining the moment of maximum focus from multiple shots at different focal distances, i.e. the Focal Stack. However, the limited sampling rate of conventional optical cameras makes it difficult to obtain sufficient focus cues during the focal sweep. Inspired by biological vision, the event camera records intensity changes over time in extremely low latency, which provides more temporal information for focus time acquisition. In this study, we propose the EDFF Network to estimate sparse depth from the Event Focal Stack. Specifically, we utilize the event voxel grid to encode intensity change information and project event time surface into the depth domain to preserve per-pixel focal distance information. A Focal-Distance-guided Cross-Modal Attention Module is presented to fuse the information mentioned above. Additionally, we propose a Multi-level Depth Fusion Block designed to integrate results from each level of a UNet-like architecture and produce the final output. Extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.