Event-based Camera Simulation using Monte Carlo Path Tracing with Adaptive Denoising

This paper proposes an algorithm for obtaining an event-based video from a noisy input video given by physics-based Monte Carlo path tracing of synthetic 3D scenes. Since the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) detects temporal brightness changes as events, the problem of efficiently rendering event-based video boils down to detecting the changes from noisy brightness values. To this end, we extend a denoising method based on a weighted local regression (WLR) to detect the brightness changes rather than applying denoising to each video frame. Specifically, we regress a WLR model only on frames where an event is detected, which significantly reduces the computational cost of the regression. We show that our efficient method is robust to noisy video frames obtained from a few path-traced samples and performs comparably to or even better than an approach that denoises every frame.