cs.CVApr 8, 2026

EventFace: Event-Based Face Recognition via Structure-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling

Authors: Qingguo Meng, Xingbo Dong, Zhe Jin, Massimo Tistarelli

Organizations: State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, the Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Secure Artificial Intelligence, Anhui Provincial International Joint Research Center for Advanced Technology in Medical Imaging, and the School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, Hefei, China · Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy

Abstract

Event cameras offer a promising sensing modality for face recognition due to their inherent advantages in illumination robustness and privacy-friendliness. However, because event streams lack the stable photometric appearance relied upon by conventional RGB-based face recognition systems, we argue that event-based face recognition should model structure-driven spatiotemporal identity representations shaped by rigid facial motion and individual facial geometry. Since dedicated datasets for event-based face recognition remain lacking, we construct EFace, a small-scale event-based face dataset captured under rigid facial motion. To learn effectively from this limited event data, we further propose EventFace, a framework for event-based face recognition that integrates spatial structure and temporal dynamics for identity modeling. Specifically, we employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to transfer structural facial priors from pretrained RGB face models to the event domain, thereby establishing a reliable spatial basis for identity modeling. Building on this foundation, we further introduce a Motion Prompt Encoder (MPE) to explicitly encode temporal features and a Spatiotemporal Modulator (STM) to fuse them with spatial features, thereby enhancing the representation of identity-relevant event patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EventFace achieves the best performance among the evaluated baselines, with a Rank-1 identification rate of 94.19% and an equal error rate (EER) of 5.35%. Results further indicate that EventFace exhibits stronger robustness under degraded illumination than the competing methods. In addition, the learned representations exhibit reduced template reconstructability.

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