EvRT-DETR: The Surprising Effectiveness of DETR-based Detection for Event Cameras

Event-based cameras (EBCs) have emerged as a bio-inspired alternative to traditional cameras, offering advantages in power efficiency, temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. However, the development of image analysis methods for EBCs is challenging due to the sparse and asynchronous nature of the data. This work addresses the problem of object detection for the EBC cameras. The current approaches to EBC object detection focus on constructing complex data representations and rely on specialized architectures. Here, we demonstrate that the combination of a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer, or RT-DETR, a state-of-the-art natural image detector, with a simple image-like representation of the EBC data achieves remarkable performance, surpassing current state-of-the-art results. Specifically, we show that a properly trained RT-DETR model on the EBC data achieves performance comparable to the most advanced EBC object detection methods. Next, we propose a low-rank adaptation (LoRA)-inspired way to augment the RT-DETR model to handle temporal dynamics of the data. The designed EvRT-DETR model outperforms the current, most advanced results on standard benchmark datasets Gen1 (mAP $+2.3$) and Gen4 (mAP $+1.4$) while only using standard modules from natural image and video analysis. These results demonstrate that effective EBC object detection can be achieved through careful adaptation of mainstream object detection architectures without requiring specialized architectural engineering. The code is available at: https://github.com/realtime-intelligence/evrt-detr