High Dynamic Range Imaging Based on an Asymmetric Event-SVE Camera System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel hardware-algorithm co-designed HDR imaging system combining an SVE micro-attenuation camera with an event sensor, improving highlight recovery and edge fidelity in challenging lighting conditions.

Contribution

It presents a new asymmetric dual-modality HDR system with a cross-modal alignment framework and a fusion network, advancing HDR imaging in dynamic environments.

Findings

Enhanced highlight recovery and edge fidelity.

Robust performance in highly dynamic lighting conditions.

Outperforms frame-only and event-only HDR methods.

Abstract

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging under extreme illumination remains challenging for conventional cameras due to overexposure. Event cameras provide microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range, while spatially varying exposure (SVE) sensors offer single-shot radiometric diversity.We present a hardware--algorithm co-designed HDR imaging system that tightly integrates an SVE micro-attenuation camera with an event sensor in an asymmetric dual-modality configuration. To handle non-coaxial geometry and heterogeneous optics, we develop a two-stage cross-modal alignment framework that combines feature-guided coarse homography estimation with a multi-scale refinement module based on spatial pooling and frequency-domain filtering. On top of aligned representations, we develop a cross-modal HDR reconstruction network with convolutional fusion, mutual-information regularization, and a learnable fusion loss that adaptively balances intensity cues and event-derived structural constraints. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic benchmarks and real captures demonstrate that the proposed system consistently improves highlight recovery, edge fidelity, and robustness compared with frame-only or event-only HDR pipelines. The results indicate that jointly optimizing optical design, cross-modal alignment, and computational fusion provides an effective foundation for reliable HDR perception in highly dynamic and radiometrically challenging environments.