S2D-LFE: Sparse-to-Dense Light Field Event Generation

In this paper, we present S2D-LFE, an innovative approach for sparse-to-dense light field event generation. For the first time to our knowledge, S2D-LFE enables controllable novel view synthesis only from sparse-view light field event (LFE) data, and addresses three critical challenges for the LFE generation task: simplicity, controllability, and consistency. The simplicity aspect eliminates the dependency on frame-based modality, which often suffers from motion blur and low frame-rate limitations. The controllability aspect enables precise view synthesis under sparse LFE conditions with view-related constraints. The consistency aspect ensures both cross-view and temporal coherence in the generated results. To realize S2D-LFE, we develop a novel diffusion-based generation network with two key components. First, we design an LFE-customized variational auto-encoder that effectively compresses and reconstructs LFE by integrating cross-view information. Second, we design an LFE-aware injection adaptor to extract comprehensive geometric and texture priors. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale synthetic LFE dataset containing 162 one-minute sequences using simulator, and capture a real-world testset using our custom-built sparse LFE acquisition system, covering diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S2D-LFE successfully generates up to 9 × 9 dense LFE from 2 × 2 sparse inputs and outperforms existing methods on both synthetic and real-world data. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Yutong2022/S2D-LFE.