# Revisiting Color-Event based Tracking: A Unified Network, Dataset, and Metric

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11010/

## Key facts

- Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [Fully-Convolutional Siamese Networks for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09549/) (2016)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [TrackingNet: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Object Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10794/) (2018)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Domain Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.07945/) (2015)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Siamese Box Adaptive Network for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06761/) (2020)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Siam R-CNN: Visual Tracking by Re-Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12836/) (2019)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [Learning Target Candidate Association to Keep Track of What Not to Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16556/) (2021)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [Event-based Moving Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04523/) (2018)
- [SwinTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00995/) (2021)
- [Know Your Surroundings: Exploiting Scene Information for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11014/) (2020)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [Transforming Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11192/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A High-Resolution Benchmark Dataset and A Novel Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14611/) (2023)
- [Single-Model and Any-Modality for Video Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15851/) (2023)
- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [SUTrack: Towards Simple and Unified Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19138/) (2024)
- [Cross-modal Orthogonal High-rank Augmentation for RGB-Event Transformer-trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04129/) (2023)
- [Towards Universal Modal Tracking with Online Dense Temporal Token Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20177/) (2025)
- [Mamba-FETrack: Frame-Event Tracking via State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18174/) (2024)
- [Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Single- and Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14394/) (2023)
- [SSTFormer: Bridging Spiking Neural Network and Memory Support Transformer for Frame-Event based Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04369/) (2023)
- [CRSOT: Cross-Resolution Object Tracking using Unaligned Frame and Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02826/) (2024)
- [MambaEVT: Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking using State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10487/) (2024)
- [eMoE-Tracker: Environmental MoE-based Transformer for Robust Event-guided Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20024/) (2024)
- [CSTrack: Enhancing RGB-X Tracking via Compact Spatiotemporal Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19434/) (2025)
- [TENet: Targetness Entanglement Incorporating with Multi-Scale Pooling and Mutually-Guided Fusion for RGB-E Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05004/) (2024)
- [Reliable Object Tracking by Multimodal Hybrid Feature Extraction and Transformer-Based Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17903/) (2024)
- [Distractor-aware Event-based Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14194/) (2023)
- [Long-Term Visual Object Tracking with Event Cameras: An Associative Memory Augmented Tracker and A Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05839/) (2024)
- [Learning Bottleneck Transformer for Event Image-Voxel Feature Fusion based Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11937/) (2023)
- [Fully Spiking Neural Networks for Unified Frame-Event Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20834/) (2025)
- [RGBT Tracking via Progressive Fusion Transformer with Dynamically Guided Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14778/) (2023)
- [Segment Any Events via Weighted Adaptation of Pivotal Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16222/) (2023)
- [Modeling State Shifting via Local-Global Distillation for Event-Frame Gaze Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00548/) (2024)
- [CM3AE: A Unified RGB Frame and Event-Voxel/-Frame Pre-training Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12576/) (2025)
- [Retain, Blend, and Exchange: A Quality-aware Spatial-Stereo Fusion Approach for Event Stream Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18845/) (2024)
- [Towards Low-Latency Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A Slow-Fast Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12903/) (2025)
- [Segment Any Events with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23159/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Subframe Splitting and Spatio-Temporal Motion Entangled Sparse Attention for RGB-E Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17560/) (2024)
- [Mamba-FETrack V2: Revisiting State Space Model for Frame-Event based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23783/) (2025)
- [Omni Survey for Multimodality Analysis in Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13000/) (2025)
- [A Tri-Modal Dataset and a Baseline System for Tracking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18344/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combining the Color and Event cameras (also called Dynamic Vision Sensors, DVS) for robust object tracking is a newly emerging research topic in recent years. Existing color-event tracking framework usually contains multiple scattered modules which may lead to low efficiency and high computational complexity, including feature extraction, fusion, matching, interactive learning, etc. In this paper, we propose a single-stage backbone network for Color-Event Unified Tracking (CEUTrack), which achieves the above functions simultaneously. Given the event points and RGB frames, we first transform the points into voxels and crop the template and search regions for both modalities, respectively. Then, these regions are projected into tokens and parallelly fed into the unified Transformer backbone network. The output features will be fed into a tracking head for target object localization. Our proposed CEUTrack is simple, effective, and efficient, which achieves over 75 FPS and new SOTA performance. To better validate the effectiveness of our model and address the data deficiency of this task, we also propose a generic and large-scale benchmark dataset for color-event tracking, termed COESOT, which contains 90 categories and 1354 video sequences. Additionally, a new evaluation metric named BOC is proposed in our evaluation toolkit to evaluate the prominence with respect to the baseline methods. We hope the newly proposed method, dataset, and evaluation metric provide a better platform for color-event-based tracking. The dataset, toolkit, and source code will be released on: urlhttps://github.com/Event-AHU/COESOT.