From Events to Enhancement: A Survey on Event-Based Imaging Technologies

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in event-based imaging technologies, focusing on sensor characteristics, enhancement tasks, and emerging applications, while discussing challenges and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of physical models, sensor characteristics, and the interaction of events with various imaging tasks, highlighting recent progress and open challenges.

Findings

Event cameras enable high dynamic range and low latency imaging.

Advances in event-based enhancement and multi-view tasks have been achieved.

Open challenges include sensor limitations and integration with traditional imaging.

Abstract

Event cameras offering high dynamic range and low latency have emerged as disruptive technologies in imaging. Despite growing research on leveraging these benefits for different imaging tasks, a comprehensive study of recently advances and challenges are still lacking. This limits the broader understanding of how to utilize events in universal imaging applications. In this survey, we first introduce a physical model and the characteristics of different event sensors as the foundation. Following this, we highlight the advancement and interaction of image/video enhancement tasks with events. Additionally, we explore advanced tasks, which capture richer light information with events, \eg~light field estimation, multi-view generation, and photometric. Finally, we discuss new challenges and open questions offering a perspective for this rapidly evolving field. More continuously updated resources are at this link: https://github.com/yunfanLu/Awesome-Event-Imaging