PhotonSplat: 3D Scene Reconstruction and Colorization from SPAD Sensors

ICCP 2025
1Indian Institute of Technology, Madras 2University of California, San Diego 3Carnagie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

* indicates equal contribution.

Teaser Figure

In scenarios involving fast camera motion, such as drone surveillance, conventional RGB captures often suffer from severe motion blur, impeding accurate 3D structure modeling. To overcome this limitation, we employ Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) camera arrays, which capture images at exceptionally high frame rates without motion blur. Our approach can successfully recover the underlying scene geometry from multi-view binary SPAD image captures. Furthermore, we demonstrate view-consistent colorization using either generative priors or a single blurry RGB image.

Abstract

Advances in 3D reconstruction have enabled high-quality 3D capture possible. However, they often fail when the input imagery is motion blurred, a scenario that occurs in the presence of cameras moving at high speed or object motion. In this paper, we advance neural rendering techniques in settings with cameras moving at high speed using single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays, an emerging sensing technology capable of sensing images at extremely high speeds. However, the use of SPADs presents its own set of unique challenges in the form of binary images, that are driven by stochastic photon arrivals. To address this, we introduce PhotonSplat, a framework designed to reconstruct 3D scenes directly from SPAD binary images, effectively navigating the noise vs. blur trade-off. Our approach incorporates a novel 3D spatial filtering technique to reduce noise in the renderings. The framework also supports both no-reference using generative priors and reference-based colorization from a single blurry image, enabling downstream applications such as segmentation, object detection and appearance editing tasks. Additionally, we extend our method to incorporate dynamic scene representations, making it suitable for scenes with moving objects. We further contribute PhotonScenes, a real-world multi-view dataset captured with the SPAD sensors.

Video

Methodology

results gallery

Camera Capture Setup

results gallery

PhotonScenes Dataset

results gallery

Novel View Synthesis from SPAD Images

results gallery

Reference-Based Colorization

results gallery

No Reference-Based Colorization

results gallery

Applications

results gallery