Physical-Based Event Camera Simulator

Haiqian Han, Jiacheng Lyu, Jianing Li, Henglu Wei, Cheng Li, Yajing Wei, CHEN SHU, Xiangyang Ji

Abstract: Existing event camera simulators primarily focus on the process of generating video events and often overlook the entire optical path in real-world camera systems. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Physical-based Event Camera Simulator (PECS), which is able to generate a high-fidelity realistic event stream by directly interfacing with the 3D scene. Our PECS features a lens simulation block for accurate light-to-sensor chip replication and a multispectral rendering module for precise photocurrent generation. We present two spatiotemporal event metrics to assess the similarity between simulated and actual camera events. Experimental results demonstrate that our PECS outperforms four state-of-the-art simulators by a large margin in terms of event-based signal fidelity. We integrate our PECS into the UE platform to generate extensive multi-task synthetic datasets and evaluate its effectiveness in downstream vision tasks (e.g., video reconstruction). Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/lanpokn/PECS_ trail_version.