NeuroLiDAR: Adaptive Frame Rate Depth Sensing via Neuromorphic Event-LiDAR Fusion

Abstract

LiDARs are widely used for 3D depth reconstruction, but their performance is often limited by inherent hardware constraints that impose trade-offs between range, spatial resolution, and frame rate. Many LiDAR systems typically operate at low frame rates (e.g., 5-10 Hz), prioritizing long-range sensing over responsiveness to rapid scene changes. We present NeuroLiDAR, an adaptive depth sensing framework that achieves effective frame rates of up to $\approx$66 Hz by fusing temporally sparse LiDAR data with temporally dense inputs from neuromorphic event cameras. NeuroLiDAR integrates two components: event-based keyframe detection and event-guided depth extrapolation, to dynamically adjust the sensing rate in response to scene dynamics. To evaluate our approach, we introduce ELiDAR, a dataset spanning outdoor and indoor scenarios, and show that NeuroLiDAR reduces depth reconstruction error by $\approx$29\% in RMSE while achieving adaptive frame rates between 27.8-47.3 Hz. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/darshanakgr/neurolidar.