Event-guided Neural Video Compression

arXiv:2610.02265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural video codecs derive motion and temporal contexts mainly from RGB frames, leaving room for cross-modal guidance from complementary temporal observations. Event streams can provide such observations by recording brightness changes between frames. In this work, we propose an Event-guided Neural Video Codec (ENVC) that uses events shared by the encoder and decoder to improve RGB compression efficiency. For motion coding, ENVC forms an event-guided motion prior and codes the remaining motion residual. For frame coding, an event-conditioned predictor supplies multi-scale features for gated temporal context refinement. To support training and evaluation on standard video datasets, we synthesize paired RGB-event data and assess its predictive utility through comparisons with real events. Across six benchmarks, ENVC achieves average BD-rate savings of 39.13% using PSNR-RGB and 67.63% using LPIPS relative to DCMVC. Further analyses show that our gains persist on large-motion sequences and that ENVC effectively learns to integrate event information. These results demonstrate the potential of events as a complementary modality for reducing the RGB coding rate. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/kjungwoo03/ENVC.