HIVE-Diff: High Frame Rate HDR Video Reconstruction from a Single LDR Frame and Events

Caixin Wang, Qingrui Wang, Jie Zhang, Ralph Etienne-Cummings

High frame rate HDR video is important in applications such as autonomous driving and scientific imaging, where rapid motion and extreme illumination often occur simultaneously. Conventional frame cameras face a trade-off between temporal resolution and dynamic range, while event cameras provide complementary high-speed brightness-change measurements over a wide illumination range. These properties have motivated event-based HDR reconstruction, with existing methods broadly following event-only and hybrid event-frame paradigms. Event-only HDR reconstruction, however, suffers from brightness and color drift due to the lack of absolute intensity references. Hybrid event-frame methods alleviate this ambiguity using low-dynamic-range (LDR) frames as anchors, but most perform one-to-one HDR reconstruction at available LDR timestamps. In this work, we investigate single-reference HDR temporal expansion, reconstructing N HDR frames from one LDR reference and events instead of N aligned LDR observations. We develop HIVE-Diff, an event-conditioned video diffusion framework that decomposes the task into event-guided temporal generation and HDR content completion. Because paired real…