# Chasing Day and Night: Towards Robust and Efficient All-Day Object Detection Guided by an Event Camera

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Going Deeper With Directly-Trained Larger Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05280/) (2020)
- [Spikformer: When Spiking Neural Network Meets Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15425/) (2022)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Temporal Efficient Training of Spiking Neural Network via Gradient Re-weighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11946/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Multi-Modal Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10826/) (2023)
- [Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00167/) (2021)
- [Time Lens++: Event-based Frame Interpolation with Parametric Non-linear Flow and Multi-scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17191/) (2022)
- [Attention Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13929/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Event-based Vision: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08890/) (2023)
- [Object Tracking by Jointly Exploiting Frame and Event Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09052/) (2021)
- [Rope3D: TheRoadside Perception Dataset for Autonomous Driving and Monocular 3D Object Detection Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13608/) (2022)
- [Optimal ANN-SNN Conversion for Fast and Accurate Inference in Deep Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11654/) (2021)
- [Time-Ordered Recent Event (TORE) Volumes for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06108/) (2021)
- [Spiking Deep Networks with LIF Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.08829/) (2015)
- [Frame-Event Alignment and Fusion Network for High Frame Rate Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15688/) (2023)
- [RGB-Event Fusion for Moving Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08323/) (2022)
- [Masked Spiking Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01208/) (2022)
- [Multi-Bracket High Dynamic Range Imaging with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06622/) (2022)
- [FuseMODNet: Real-Time Camera and LiDAR based Moving Object Detection for robust low-light Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05395/) (2019)
- [EVEN: An Event-Based Framework for Monocular Depth Estimation at Adverse Night Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03860/) (2023)
- [Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17046/) (2023)
- [A Single Multi-Task Deep Neural Network with Post-Processing for Object Detection with Reasoning and Robotic Grasp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07050/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Modality-agnostic Representation for Semantic Segmentation from Any Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11351/) (2024)
- [EventDance: Unsupervised Source-free Cross-modal Adaptation for Event-based Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14082/) (2024)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [Domain-RAG: Retrieval-Guided Compositional Image Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05872/) (2025)
- [MAGIC++: Efficient and Resilient Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation via Hierarchical Modality Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16876/) (2024)
- [MemorySAM: Memorize Modalities and Semantics with Segment Anything Model 2 for Multi-modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06700/) (2025)
- [Reducing Unimodal Bias in Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Scale Functional Entropy Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06635/) (2025)
- [Efficient Event-Based Semantic Segmentation via Exploiting Frame-Event Fusion: A Hybrid Neural Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03765/) (2025)
- [Beyond conventional vision: RGB-event fusion for robust object detection in dynamic traffic scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10704/) (2025)
- [PEOD: A Pixel-Aligned Event-RGB Benchmark for Object Detection under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08140/) (2025)
- [E-VLA: Event-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Dark and Blurred Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04834/) (2026)
- [Towards Dynamic and Small Objects Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptative Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04747/) (2023)
- [EIT-1M: One Million EEG-Image-Text Pairs for Human Visual-textual Recognition and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01884/) (2024)
- [EvDetMAV: Generalized MAV Detection from Moving Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19416/) (2025)
- [Edge Intelligence with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14069/) (2025)
- [ES-Parkour: Advanced Robot Parkour with Bio-inspired Event Camera and Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09985/) (2025)
- [Focus Through Motion: RGB-Event Collaborative Token Sparsification for Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03872/) (2025)
- [BiXFormer: A Robust Framework for Maximizing Modality Effectiveness in Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03675/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Event-based Object Detection with Monocular Normal Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02127/) (2025)
- [Towards Closing the Domain Gap with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16178/) (2025)
- [Neuromorphic Object Detection: An In-Depth Study and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23576/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/