# BlinkFlow: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Event-based Optical Flow Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07716 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07716/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [Twins: Revisiting the Design of Spatial Attention in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13840/) (2021)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Event-based Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08156/) (2018)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [EV-FlowNet: Self-Supervised Optical Flow Estimation for Event-based Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06898/) (2018)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [E-RAFT: Dense Optical Flow from Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10552/) (2021)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [Spike-FlowNet: Event-based Optical Flow Estimation with Energy-Efficient Hybrid Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06696/) (2020)
- [Secrets of Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10022/) (2022)
- [Spatio-Temporal Recurrent Networks for Event-Based Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04871/) (2021)
- [Optical flow estimation from event-based cameras and spiking neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06492/) (2023)
- [Distance Surface for Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12680/) (2020)
- [DELTAR: Depth Estimation from a Light-weight ToF Sensor and RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13362/) (2022)
- [Autonomous Quadrotor Flight despite Rotor Failure with Onboard Vision Sensors: Frames vs. Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13406/) (2021)
- [Event Guided Depth Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10505/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08340/) (2023)
- [OpenESS: Event-based Semantic Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05259/) (2024)
- [Event Camera Data Dense Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11533/) (2023)
- [EventHDR: from Event to High-Speed HDR Videos and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17029/) (2024)
- [Towards Anytime Optical Flow Estimation with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05033/) (2023)
- [SEVD: Synthetic Event-based Vision Dataset for Ego and Fixed Traffic Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10540/) (2024)
- [BlinkVision: A Benchmark for Optical Flow, Scene Flow and Point Tracking Estimation using RGB Frames and Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20451/) (2024)
- [EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13707/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Joint Learning of Optical Flow and Intensity with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17262/) (2025)
- [Context-PIPs: Persistent Independent Particles Demands Spatial Context Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02000/) (2023)
- [ETAP: Event-based Tracking of Any Point](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00133/) (2024)
- [EMatch: A Unified Framework for Event-based Optical Flow and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21735/) (2024)
- [ETO:Efficient Transformer-based Local Feature Matching by Organizing Multiple Homography Hypotheses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22733/) (2024)
- [EDCFlow: Exploring Temporally Dense Difference Maps for Event-based Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03512/) (2025)
- [Learning Normal Flow Directly From Event Neighborhoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11284/) (2024)
- [Vector-Symbolic Architecture for Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08300/) (2024)
- [BlinkTrack: Feature Tracking over 80 FPS via Events and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17981/) (2024)
- [V2V: Scaling Event-Based Vision through Efficient Video-to-Voxel Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16797/) (2025)
- [TESPEC: Temporally-Enhanced Self-Supervised Pretraining for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00913/) (2025)
- [Learning Efficient Meshflow and Optical Flow from Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04111/) (2025)
- [A Global Depth-Range-Free Multi-View Stereo Transformer Network with Pose Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01893/) (2024)
- [Hardware, Algorithms, and Applications of the Neuromorphic Vision Sensor: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08588/) (2025)
- [Event Camera Guided Visual Media Restoration & 3D Reconstruction: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09971/) (2025)
- [Perturbed State Space Feature Encoders for Optical Flow with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10669/) (2025)
- [EventTracer: Fast Path Tracing-based Event Stream Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18071/) (2025)
- [SDformerFlow: Spatiotemporal swin spikeformer for event-based optical flow estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04082/) (2024)
- [EvtSlowTV -- A Large and Diverse Dataset for Event-Based Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02953/) (2025)
- [TAPFormer: Robust Arbitrary Point Tracking via Transient Asynchronous Fusion of Frames and Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04989/) (2026)
- [From Contrast to Consistency: Rethinking Event-based Continuous-Time Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25570/) (2026)
- [Spatio-Temporal State Space Model For Efficient Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07878/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras provide high temporal precision, low data rates, and high dynamic range visual perception, which are well-suited for optical flow estimation. While data-driven optical flow estimation has obtained great success in RGB cameras, its generalization performance is seriously hindered in event cameras mainly due to the limited and biased training data. In this paper, we present a novel simulator, BlinkSim, for the fast generation of large-scale data for event-based optical flow. BlinkSim incorporates a configurable rendering engine alongside an event simulation suite. By leveraging the wealth of current 3D assets, the rendering engine enables us to automatically build up thousands of scenes with different objects, textures, and motion patterns and render very high-frequency images for realistic event data simulation. Based on BlinkSim, we construct a large training dataset and evaluation benchmark BlinkFlow that contains sufficient, diversiform, and challenging event data with optical flow ground truth. Experiments show that BlinkFlow improves the generalization performance of state-of-the-art methods by more than 40% on average and up to 90%. Moreover, we further propose an Event-based optical Flow transFormer (E-FlowFormer) architecture. Powered by our BlinkFlow, E-FlowFormer outperforms the SOTA methods by up to 91% on the MVSEC dataset and 14% on the DSEC dataset and presents the best generalization performance. The source code and data are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/blinkflow/.