Exploring The Missing Semantics In Event Modality

Event cameras offer distinct advantages such as low latency, high dynamic range, and efficient motion capture. However, event-to-video reconstruction (E2V), a fundamental event-based vision task, remains challenging, particularly for reconstructing and recovering semantic information. This is primarily due to the nature of the event camera, as it only captures intensity changes, ignoring static objects and backgrounds, resulting in a lack of semantic information in captured event modality. Further, semantic information plays a crucial role in video and frame reconstruction, yet is often overlooked by existing E2V approaches. To bridge this gap, we propose Semantic-E2VID, an E2V framework that explores the missing visual semantic knowledge in event modality and leverages it to enhance event-to-video reconstruction. Specifically, Semantic-E2VID introduces a cross-modal feature alignment (CFA) module to transfer the robust visual semantics from a frame-based vision foundation model, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to the event encoder, while aligning the high-level features from distinct modalities. To better utilize the learned semantic feature, we further propose a semantic-aware feature fusion (SFF) block to integrate learned semantics in frame modality to form event representations with rich semantics that can be decoded by the event decoder. Further, to facilitate the reconstruction of semantic information, we propose a novel Semantic Perceptual E2V Supervision that helps the model to reconstruct semantic details by leveraging SAM-generated categorical labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Semantic-E2VID significantly enhances frame quality, outperforming state-of-the-art E2V methods across multiple benchmarks. The sample code is included in the supplementary material.