EventTracer: Fast Path Tracing-based Event Stream Rendering

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.

Learned Off-aperture Encoding for Wide Field-of-view RGBD Imaging

End-to-end (E2E) designed imaging systems integrate coded optical designs with decoding algorithms to enhance imaging fidelity for diverse visual tasks. However, existing E2E designs encounter significant challenges in maintaining high image fidelity at wide fields of view, due to high computational complexity, as well as difficulties in modeling off-axis wave propagation while accounting for off-axis aberrations. In particular, the common approach of placing the encoding element into the aperture or pupil plane results in only a global control of the wavefront. To overcome these limitations, this work explores an additional design choice by positioning a DOE off-aperture, enabling a spatial unmixing of the degrees of freedom and providing local control over the wavefront over the image plane. Our approach further leverages hybrid refractive-diffractive optical systems by linking differentiable ray and wave optics modeling, thereby optimizing depth imaging quality and demonstrating system versatility. Experimental results reveal that the off-aperture DOE enhances the imaging quality by over 5 dB in PSNR at a FoV of approximately $45^\circ$ when paired with a simple thin lens, outperforming traditional on-aperture systems. Furthermore, we successfully recover color and depth information at nearly $28^\circ$ FoV using off-aperture DOE configurations with compound optics. Physical prototypes for both applications validate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed method.

Dark-EvGS: Event Camera as an Eye for Radiance Field in the Dark

In low-light environments, conventional cameras often struggle to capture clear multi-view images of objects due to dynamic range limitations and motion blur caused by long exposure. Event cameras, with their high-dynamic range and high-speed properties, have the potential to mitigate these issues. Additionally, 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) enables radiance field reconstruction, facilitating bright frame synthesis from multiple viewpoints in low-light conditions. However, naively using an event-assisted 3D GS approach still faced challenges because, in low light, events are noisy, frames lack quality, and the color tone may be inconsistent. To address these issues, we propose Dark-EvGS, the first event-assisted 3D GS framework that enables the reconstruction of bright frames from arbitrary viewpoints along the camera trajectory. Triplet-level supervision is proposed to gain holistic knowledge, granular details, and sharp scene rendering. The color tone matching block is proposed to guarantee the color consistency of the rendered frames. Furthermore, we introduce the first real-captured dataset for the event-guided bright frame synthesis task via 3D GS-based radiance field reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves better results than existing methods, conquering radiance field reconstruction under challenging low-light conditions. The code and sample data are included in the supplementary material.

DreamComposer++: Empowering Diffusion Models with Multi-View Conditions for 3D Content Generation

Recent advancements in leveraging pre-trained 2D diffusion models achieve the generation of high-quality novel views from a single in-the-wild image. However, existing works face challenges in producing controllable novel views due to the lack of information from multiple views. In this paper, we present DreamComposer++, a flexible and scalable framework designed to improve current view-aware diffusion models by incorporating multi-view conditions. Specifically, DreamComposer++ utilizes a view-aware 3D lifting module to extract 3D representations of an object from various views. These representations are then aggregated and rendered into the latent features of target view through the multi-view feature fusion module. Finally, the obtained features of target view are integrated into pre-trained image or video diffusion models for novel view synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that DreamComposer++ seamlessly integrates with cutting-edge view-aware diffusion models and enhances their abilities to generate controllable novel views from multi-view conditions. This advancement facilitates controllable 3D object reconstruction and enables a wide range of applications.

Near-infrared Image Deblurring and Event Denoising with Synergistic Neuromorphic Imaging

The fields of imaging in the nighttime dynamic and other extremely dark conditions have seen impressive and transformative advancements in recent years, partly driven by the rise of novel sensing approaches, e.g., near-infrared (NIR) cameras with high sensitivity and event cameras with minimal blur. However, inappropriate exposure ratios of near-infrared cameras make them susceptible to distortion and blur. Event cameras are also highly sensitive to weak signals at night yet prone to interference, often generating substantial noise and significantly degrading observations and analysis. Herein, we develop a new framework for low-light imaging combined with NIR imaging and event-based techniques, named synergistic neuromorphic imaging, which can jointly achieve NIR image deblurring and event denoising. Harnessing cross-modal features of NIR images and visible events via spectral consistency and higher-order interaction, the NIR images and events are simultaneously fused, enhanced, and bootstrapped. Experiments on real and realistically simulated sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and indicate better accuracy and robustness than other methods in practical scenarios. This study gives impetus to enhance both NIR images and events, which paves the way for high-fidelity low-light imaging and neuromorphic reasoning.

A generative approach for lensless imaging in low-light conditions

Lensless imaging offers a lightweight, compact alternative to traditional lens-based systems, ideal for exploration in space-constrained environments. However, the absence of a focusing lens and limited lighting in such environments often result in low-light conditions, where the measurements suffer from complex noise interference due to insufficient capture of photons. This study presents a robust reconstruction method for high-quality imaging in low-light scenarios, employing two complementary perspectives: model-driven and data-driven. First, we apply a physic-model-driven perspective to reconstruct in the range space of the pseudo-inverse of the measurement model as a first guidance to extract information in the noisy measurements. Then, we integrate a generative-model based perspective to suppress residual noises as the second guidance to suppress noises in the initial noisy results. Specifically, a learnable Wiener filter-based module generates an initial noisy reconstruction. Then, for fast and, more importantly, stable generation of the clear image from the noisy version, we implement a modified conditional generative diffusion module. This module converts the raw image into the latent wavelet domain for efficiency and uses modified bidirectional training processes for stabilization. Simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in overall visual quality, advancing lensless imaging in challenging low-light environments.

SweepEvGS: Event-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting for Macro and Micro Radiance Field Rendering from a Single Sweep

Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) have demonstrated the potential of using 3D Gaussian primitives for high-speed, high-fidelity, and cost-efficient novel view synthesis from continuously calibrated input views. However, conventional methods require high-frame-rate dense and high-quality sharp images, which are time-consuming and inefficient to capture, especially in dynamic environments. Event cameras, with their high temporal resolution and ability to capture asynchronous brightness changes, offer a promising alternative for more reliable scene reconstruction without motion blur. In this paper, we propose SweepEvGS, a novel hardware-integrated method that leverages event cameras for robust and accurate novel view synthesis across various imaging settings from a single sweep. SweepEvGS utilizes the initial static frame with dense event streams captured during a single camera sweep to effectively reconstruct detailed scene views. We also introduce different real-world hardware imaging systems for real-world data collection and evaluation for future research. We validate the robustness and efficiency of SweepEvGS through experiments in three different imaging settings: synthetic objects, real-world macro-level, and real-world micro-level view synthesis. Our results demonstrate that SweepEvGS surpasses existing methods in visual rendering quality, rendering speed, and computational efficiency, highlighting its potential for dynamic practical applications.

SAMPart3D: Segment Any Part in 3D Objects

3D part segmentation is a crucial and challenging task in 3D perception, playing a vital role in applications such as robotics, 3D generation, and 3D editing. Recent methods harness the powerful Vision Language Models (VLMs) for 2D-to-3D knowledge distillation, achieving zero-shot 3D part segmentation. However, these methods are limited by their reliance on text prompts, which restricts the scalability to large-scale unlabeled datasets and the flexibility in handling part ambiguities. In this work, we introduce SAMPart3D, a scalable zero-shot 3D part segmentation framework that segments any 3D object into semantic parts at multiple granularities, without requiring predefined part label sets as text prompts. For scalability, we use text-agnostic vision foundation models to distill a 3D feature extraction backbone, allowing scaling to large unlabeled 3D datasets to learn rich 3D priors. For flexibility, we distill scale-conditioned part-aware 3D features for 3D part segmentation at multiple granularities. Once the segmented parts are obtained from the scale-conditioned part-aware 3D features, we use VLMs to assign semantic labels to each part based on the multi-view renderings. Compared to previous methods, our SAMPart3D can scale to the recent large-scale 3D object dataset Objaverse and handle complex, non-ordinary objects. Additionally, we contribute a new 3D part segmentation benchmark to address the lack of diversity and complexity of objects and parts in existing benchmarks. Experiments show that our SAMPart3D significantly outperforms existing zero-shot 3D part segmentation methods, and can facilitate various applications such as part-level editing and interactive segmentation.

Ev-GS: Event-based Gaussian splatting for Efficient and Accurate Radiance Field Rendering

Computational neuromorphic imaging (CNI) with event cameras offers advantages such as minimal motion blur and enhanced dynamic range, compared to conventional frame-based methods. Existing event-based radiance field rendering methods are built on neural radiance field, which is computationally heavy and slow in reconstruction speed. Motivated by the two aspects, we introduce Ev-GS, the first CNI-informed scheme to infer 3D Gaussian splatting from a monocular event camera, enabling efficient novel view synthesis. Leveraging 3D Gaussians with pure event-based supervision, Ev-GS overcomes challenges such as the detection of fast-moving objects and insufficient lighting. Experimental results show that Ev-GS outperforms the method that takes frame-based signals as input by rendering realistic views with reduced blurring and improved visual quality. Moreover, it demonstrates competitive reconstruction quality and reduced computing occupancy compared to existing methods, which paves the way to a highly efficient CNI approach for signal processing.

Neuromorphic Imaging with Super-Resolution

Neuromorphic imaging is a bio-inspired technique that imitates the human retina to sense variations in a dynamic scene. It responds to pixel-level brightness changes by asynchronous streaming events and boasts microsecond temporal precision over a high dynamic range, yielding blur-free recordings under extreme illumination. Nevertheless, such a modality falls short in spatial resolution and leads to a low level of visual richness and clarity. Pursuing hardware upgrades is expensive and might cause compromised performance due to more burdens on computational requirements. Another option is to harness offline, plug-in-play neuromorphic super-resolution solutions. However, existing ones, which demand substantial sample volumes for lengthy training on massive computing resources, are largely restricted by real data availability owing to the current imperfect high-resolution devices, as well as the randomness and variability of motion. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the first self-supervised neuromorphic super-resolution prototype. It can be self-adaptive to per input source from any low-resolution camera to estimate an optimal, high-resolution counterpart of any scale, without the need of side knowledge and prior training. Evaluated on downstream event-driven tasks, such a simple yet effective method can obtain competitive results against the state-of-the-arts, significantly promoting flexibility but not sacrificing accuracy. It also delivers enhancements for inferior natural images and optical micrographs acquired under non-ideal imaging conditions, breaking through the limitations that are challenging to overcome with traditional frame techniques. In the current landscape where the use of high-resolution cameras for event-based sensing remains an open debate, our solution serves as a cost-efficient and practical alternative, paving the way for more intelligent imaging systems.