Abstract:Benefiting from high temporal resolution and dynamic range, event-based local feature methods have attracted increasing attention. However, event sparsity, noise, and limited texture still hinder robust local feature learning. Deploying such methods on resource-constrained platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles also requires balancing accuracy and energy efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes \textbf{E-S2Feat}, a spiking neural network framework for event-based local feature detection and description. The framework jointly optimizes local feature learning from the perspectives of feature representation and selection. First, a module-specific spiking activation mechanism preserves fine-grained structural cues and discriminative information under low-bit, energy-efficient inference, thereby improving overall representation fidelity. Furthermore, a semantic-guided feature modulation mechanism leverages semantic priors to refine keypoint response distributions and enhance local descriptor discriminability, thereby guiding the model to extract local features with greater geometric stability and stronger discriminative capability. Experiments on the ECD and EDS datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline methods such as SuperEvent in pose estimation accuracy. It also achieves accuracy comparable to its artificial neural network counterpart while delivering an approximately 4.8-fold improvement in theoretical computational energy efficiency. Visual-inertial odometry experiments on the TUM-VIE dataset further verify the effectiveness and practical application potential of the proposed method in complete SLAM systems.
Abstract:The integration of image and event streams offers a promising approach for achieving robust visual object tracking in complex environments. However, current fusion methods achieve high performance at the cost of significant computational overhead and struggle to efficiently extract the sparse, asynchronous information from event streams, failing to leverage the energy-efficient advantages of event-driven spiking paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose the first fully Spiking Frame-Event Tracking framework called SpikeFET. This network achieves synergistic integration of convolutional local feature extraction and Transformer-based global modeling within the spiking paradigm, effectively fusing frame and event data. To overcome the degradation of translation invariance caused by convolutional padding, we introduce a Random Patchwork Module (RPM) that eliminates positional bias through randomized spatial reorganization and learnable type encoding while preserving residual structures. Furthermore, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Regularization (STR) strategy that overcomes similarity metric degradation from asymmetric features by enforcing spatio-temporal consistency among temporal template features in latent space. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior tracking accuracy over existing methods while significantly reducing power consumption, attaining an optimal balance between performance and efficiency. The code will be released.