NEC-Diff: Noise-Robust Event-RAW Complementary Diffusion for Seeing Motion in Extreme Darkness

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Haoyue, Xu, Jinghan, Feng, Luxin, Zhou, Hanyu, Zhao, Haozhi, Chang, Yi, Yan, Luxin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Liu, Haoyue
Xu, Jinghan
Feng, Luxin
Zhou, Hanyu
Zhao, Haozhi
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
author_facet Liu, Haoyue
Xu, Jinghan
Feng, Luxin
Zhou, Hanyu
Zhao, Haozhi
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
contents High-quality imaging of dynamic scenes in extremely low-light conditions is highly challenging. Photon scarcity induces severe noise and texture loss, causing significant image degradation. Event cameras, featuring a high dynamic range (120 dB) and high sensitivity to motion, serve as powerful complements to conventional cameras by offering crucial cues for preserving subtle textures. However, most existing approaches emphasize texture recovery from events, while paying little attention to image noise or the intrinsic noise of events themselves, which ultimately hinders accurate pixel reconstruction under photon-starved conditions. In this work, we propose NEC-Diff, a novel diffusion-based event-RAW hybrid imaging framework that extracts reliable information from heavily noisy signals to reconstruct fine scene structures. The framework is driven by two key insights: (1) combining the linear light-response property of RAW images with the brightness-change nature of events to establish a physics-driven constraint for robust dual-modal denoising; and (2) dynamically estimating the SNR of both modalities based on denoising results to guide adaptive feature fusion, thereby injecting reliable cues into the diffusion process for high-fidelity visual reconstruction. Furthermore, we construct the REAL (Raw and Event Acquired in Low-light) dataset which provides 47,800 pixel-aligned low-light RAW images, events, and high-quality references under 0.001-0.8 lux illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of NEC-Diff under extreme darkness. The project are available at: https://github.com/jinghan-xu/NEC-Diff.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20005
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NEC-Diff: Noise-Robust Event-RAW Complementary Diffusion for Seeing Motion in Extreme Darkness
Liu, Haoyue
Xu, Jinghan
Feng, Luxin
Zhou, Hanyu
Zhao, Haozhi
Chang, Yi
Yan, Luxin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
High-quality imaging of dynamic scenes in extremely low-light conditions is highly challenging. Photon scarcity induces severe noise and texture loss, causing significant image degradation. Event cameras, featuring a high dynamic range (120 dB) and high sensitivity to motion, serve as powerful complements to conventional cameras by offering crucial cues for preserving subtle textures. However, most existing approaches emphasize texture recovery from events, while paying little attention to image noise or the intrinsic noise of events themselves, which ultimately hinders accurate pixel reconstruction under photon-starved conditions. In this work, we propose NEC-Diff, a novel diffusion-based event-RAW hybrid imaging framework that extracts reliable information from heavily noisy signals to reconstruct fine scene structures. The framework is driven by two key insights: (1) combining the linear light-response property of RAW images with the brightness-change nature of events to establish a physics-driven constraint for robust dual-modal denoising; and (2) dynamically estimating the SNR of both modalities based on denoising results to guide adaptive feature fusion, thereby injecting reliable cues into the diffusion process for high-fidelity visual reconstruction. Furthermore, we construct the REAL (Raw and Event Acquired in Low-light) dataset which provides 47,800 pixel-aligned low-light RAW images, events, and high-quality references under 0.001-0.8 lux illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of NEC-Diff under extreme darkness. The project are available at: https://github.com/jinghan-xu/NEC-Diff.
title NEC-Diff: Noise-Robust Event-RAW Complementary Diffusion for Seeing Motion in Extreme Darkness
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20005