Following the Flow: Advection-Consistent Modeling for Event-based Small Object Detection

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that asynchronously capture logarithmic intensity changes, offering inherent advantages in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios. However, the sparse and asynchronous nature of event streams poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep learning architectures. To enable compatibility with standard models, most existing approaches partition the accumulation window into fixed temporal sub-bins. While effective for spatial processing, this internal discretization discards fine-grained temporal structure and constrains inference to the low temporal frequencies imposed by training supervision. To address this limitation, we propose FATE, a unified framework built upon a novel Pillar Encoding (PE). While operating over discrete macro-accumulation windows dictated by the target frequency, PE avoids internal temporal sub-binning. It organizes events into spatial pillars and approximates their intra-window evolution via projection onto a continuous-time orthogonal polynomial basis. This formulation yields an L2-optimal representation that retains rich temporal dynamics in a dense pseudo-image, mitigating information loss under sparse event conditions. To fully leverage this representation, we introduce Frequency-Aware Training (FAT), a soft mean-teacher curriculum that generates temporally dense pseudo-labels, effectively bridging the mismatch between low-frequency supervision and high-frequency inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FATE generalizes across architectural paradigms and consistently outperforms strong baselines. It enables robust object detection at high temporal resolutions up to 200 Hz, while incurring minimal overhead in parameter count and inference latency

Event-based cameras capture visual information as asynchronous streams of per-pixel brightness changes, generating sparse, temporally precise data. Compared to conventional frame-based sensors, they offer significant advantages in capturing high-speed dynamics while consuming substantially less power. Predicting future event representations from past observations is an important problem, enabling downstream tasks such as future semantic segmentation or object tracking without requiring access to future sensor measurements. While recent state-of-the-art approaches achieve strong performance, they often rely on computationally heavy backbones and, in some cases, large-scale pretraining, limiting their applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. In this work, we introduce E-TIDE, a lightweight, end-to-end trainable architecture for event-tensor prediction that is designed to operate efficiently without large-scale pretraining. Our approach employs the TIDE module (Temporal Interaction for Dynamic Events), motivated by efficient spatiotemporal interaction design for sparse event tensors, to capture temporal dependencies via large-kernel mixing and activity-aware gating while maintaining low computational complexity. Experiments on standard event-based datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with significantly reduced model size and training requirements, making it well-suited for real-time deployment under tight latency and memory budgets.

Event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range, offering potential for perception under fast motion and challenging illumination conditions. However, existing Event-based Object Detection (EOD) methods face limitations at both the representation and model levels: prior event representations usually encode temporal information indirectly through redundant structures, while detection models struggle to explicitly aggregate fragmented event responses into coherent high-order object features. To address these limitations, we present Event Dual Temporal-Relational Aggregation Detector (Ev-DTAD), a unified EOD framework that integrates representation-level temporal encoding with model-level temporal-hypergraph reasoning. Specifically, we introduce Hierarchical Temporal Aggregation (HTA), a compact three-channel pseudo-RGB representation that explicitly embeds temporal information across intra- and inter-window events. To further enhance detection under sparse and fragmented event responses, we propose Frequency-aware Hypergraph Temporal Fusion (FHTF), which refines multi-scale event features through temporal evolution modeling and high-order relational reasoning. Extensive experiments on Gen1 (+0.8 mAP and 1.7$\times$ faster), 1Mpx/Gen4 (+0.5 mAP and 1.6$\times$ faster), and eTraM (+3.0 mAP and 2.0$\times$ faster) demonstrate that Ev-DTAD achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off, validating the complementarity between compact temporal representation and temporal-hypergraph feature reasoning.