EventSeeColor: Learning to Reconstruct Color from Monochrome Events
Chuanzhi Xu, Langyi Chen, Haoxian Zhou, Zelin Zhang, Haodong Chen, Qiang Qu, Xiaoming Chen, Weidong Cai
Abstract
Event cameras capture visual brightness changes under challenging lighting conditions. However, traditional event-based image reconstruction targets grayscale intensity and produces images without scene color. Color distinguishes surfaces with similar intensity. Reconstructing color from events can reveal appearance differences that reconstructed grayscale images cannot express. Although monochrome event cameras do not directly measure color, their event-triggering patterns depend on surface reflectance, illumination, and the sensor's spectral response. These patterns may contain cues that support color reconstruction. In this paper, we present EventSeeColor, which uses event-reconstructed grayscale and aligned events to jointly guide a diffusion colorizer. Grayscale-derived semantic context supports color inference, while region-balanced chroma supervision and local RGB refinement improve color distribution, brightness, and texture. In the combined evaluation on two real event datasets, EventSeeColor achieves the best structural similarity, learned perceptual scores, and chromatic-region color difference among the external methods.