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
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.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: (a) Traditional RGB face recognition is sensitive to lighting variations and vulnerable to template reconstruction attacks. (b) By contrast, event-based face recognition leverages structure-driven spatiotemporal patterns generated by rigid facial motion, achieving more stable recognition under varying illumination while reducing reconstructability from leaked templates.
Fig. 2: Overview of the EFace dataset acquisition setup. Subjects perform natural rigid facial motions (e.g., nodding and shaking) to induce intensity changes captured by the event camera, producing spatiotemporal event streams. For the challenging test subset, an RGB camera is mounted in close proximity to the event camera, and the two modalities are acquired in a synchronized manner to ensure consistent illumination conditions.
Fig. 3: Overview of the proposed EventFace framework. The training process is structured into two progressive stages. In Stage I, the pretrained RGB backbone is frozen to retain structural priors, while LoRA modules are trained to align event features with the RGB domain. In Stage II, the adapted backbone is frozen. The Motion Prompt Encoder (MPE) and Spatiotemporal Modulator (STM) are introduced to work collaboratively at each stage: the MPE explicitly extracts motion prompts from event streams, which are then fused with spatial features via the STM module. This mechanism facilitates bidirectional interaction, allowing both spatial and temporal representations to be mutually refined before they are propagated to the next stage.
Fig. 4: Spatial attention visualization via Grad-CAM. Heatmaps highlight regions that contribute most to pairwise similarity.
Fig. 5: Illustration of the Spatiotemporal Interleaved WKV (ST-WKV). Top: The overall data flow. The module takes spatial and motion features as input, concatenates them in an interleaved manner, and processes them through cascaded Bi-WKV layers. Bottom: Visualization of the Row-Major and Column-Major Spatiotemporal Interleaved Scans.
Components
EER (%) ↓
Backbone
Stage I
Stage II
✓
28.81
✓
✓
7.06
✓
✓
10.57
✓
✓
✓
5.35
TABLE I: Effectiveness of the two-stage framework. The backbone is AdaFace pretrained on the WebFace4M dataset.
Strategy
Rank-1 (%) ↑
EER (%) ↓
Full Fine-Tuning
91.18
7.26
Adapter Tuning
90.73
7.96
LoRA Tuning
92.09
6.81
TABLE II: Performance comparison of different tuning strategies.
MPE
STM
Rank-1 (%) ↑
EER (%) ↓
Kernel Size
Token Shift
Token Arrangement
5-3
Octa-Shift
Interleaved
93.65
5.82
7-3
Q-Shift
Interleaved
93.20
6.45
7-3
Octa-Shift
Sequential
92.24
6.18
7-3
Octa-Shift
Interleaved
94.19
5.35
TABLE III: Joint ablation of motion encoding and spatiotemporal modeling strategies in Stage II.
Fig. 6: Effect of the input event-frame count on recognition performance and computational cost. Each event frame is accumulated over a fixed 50 ms interval.
Fig. 7: CMC, DET, and ROC curves of EventFace and competing methods on the EFace benchmark. EventFace achieves the best overall identification and verification performance among the evaluated methods.
Fig. 8: Cosine similarity distributions under the degraded illumination challenge. (a) Event modality and (b) RGB modality. The plots illustrate the distributions of genuine (green) and impostor (gray) matching pairs.
Fig. 9: Visualization of matching examples under the degraded illumination challenge. The Gallery samples are captured under standard indoor lighting, while the Probe samples correspond to varying low-light levels (Levels 1–3) and sidelight conditions. The computed cosine similarity scores are annotated for both RGB and Event modalities.
Fig. 10: Visualization of face reconstruction from leaked feature templates. The top rows (GT) display the ground-truth Event Frames, while the bottom rows (Shahreza et al. ) show the reconstructed results.
Fig. 11: Privacy evaluation under a worst-case raw data leakage scenario. We employ representative event-to-video reconstruction algorithms, E2VID and Sparse-E2VID, to recover visual information directly from the 200 ms raw event streams.
Emotion analysis is a fundamental task in computer vision, but its practical deployment remains constrained by the privacy risks inherent to conventional RGB cameras. Bio-inspired event cameras present a promising hardware-level solution because they capture asynchronous brightness changes, thereby reducing exposure of facial identity details while leveraging high dynamic range for robust perception under challenging illumination conditions. Despite these advantages, existing event-based methods struggle in complex real-world settings due to limited dataset scales, simple acquisition conditions, and reliance on single-modality visual cues. To address these, we establish a challenging tri-modal benchmark with event, audio, and text modalities and propose the Information-Guided Gated Fusion (IGF) framework, which first pre-trains an event encoder on the FAU subset of Emo-DVS to capture fine-grained facial dynamics, then employs adaptive modality gating to suppress modality-specific noise, and finally leverages mutual information maximization to align robust cross-modal representations. To alleviate data scarcity, we introduce Emo-DVS, the first large-scale event-based emotion analysis dataset, which couples dynamic illumination with the Facial Action Unit (FAU) subset and emotion subset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IGF achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Gait recognition enables non-intrusive, privacy-preserving identification but suffers in uncontrolled environments due to illumination and motion sensitivity of conventional cameras. In this work, we explore gait recognition using event cameras, which offer microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range, naturally capturing robust dynamic cues and suppressing static noise. Existing event-based approaches typically aggregate event streams into event images over long time windows, thereby discarding fine-grained motion dynamics critical for gait recognition. Therefore, we propose EventGait, an end-to-end dual-stream framework that separately models motion and shape while preserving the advantages of events. Our dynamic stream leverages a Mixture of Spiking Experts (MoSE) with diverse neuron constants for robust dynamic perception across complex motion and illumination scenes, while the static stream learns dense shape representations via Cross-modal Structure Alignment (CroSA) with large vision foundation models. To address the absence of large-scale event-based gait datasets, we introduce a synthesis pipeline and release two new benchmarks: SUSTech1K-E and CCGR-Mini-E. Extensive experiments have shown that event-based gait recognition not only achieves results comparable to camera-based gait recognition under normal conditions but also significantly outperforms it in low-light scenarios. Our approach sets a new state of the art on both synthesized and real-world event-based gait benchmarks, highlighting the robustness and potential of event-driven gait analysis. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/QUEAHREN/EventGait.
Senyan Xu, Shuai Chen, Chuanfu Shen +4
University of Science and Technology of China · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Event cameras record luminance changes with microsecond resolution, but converting their sparse, asynchronous output into dense tensors that neural networks can exploit remains a core challenge. Conventional histograms or globally-decayed time-surface representations apply fixed temporal parameters across the entire image plane, which in practice creates a trade-off between preserving spatial structure during still periods and retaining sharp edges during rapid motion. We introduce Locally Adaptive Decay Surfaces (LADS), a family of event representations in which the temporal decay at each location is modulated according to local signal dynamics. Three strategies are explored, based on event rate, Laplacian-of-Gaussian response, and high-frequency spectral energy. These adaptive schemes preserve detail in quiescent regions while reducing blur in regions of dense activity. Extensive experiments on the public data show that LADS consistently improves both face detection and facial landmark accuracy compared to standard non-adaptive representations. At 30 Hz, LADS achieves higher detection accuracy and lower landmark error than either baseline, and at 240 Hz it mitigates the accuracy decline typically observed at higher frequencies, sustaining 2.44 % normalized mean error for landmarks and 0.966 mAP50 in face detection. These high-frequency results even surpass the accuracy reported in prior works operating at 30 Hz, setting new benchmarks for event-based face analysis. Moreover, by preserving spatial structure at the representation stage, LADS supports the use of much lighter network architectures while still retaining real-time performance. These results highlight the importance of context-aware temporal integration for neuromorphic vision and point toward real-time, high-frequency human-computer interaction systems that exploit the unique advantages of event cameras.
Paul Kielty, Timothy Hanley, Peter Corcoran
With the College of Science and Engineering, University of Galway, Ireland.