# SFOD: Spiking Fusion Object Detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Surrogate Gradient Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09948/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Incorporating Learnable Membrane Time Constant to Enhance Learning of Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05785/) (2020)
- [Deep Residual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04159/) (2021)
- [HATS: Histograms of Averaged Time Surfaces for Robust Event-based Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07913/) (2018)
- [Learning to Detect Objects with a 1 Megapixel Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13436/) (2020)
- [Spiking-YOLO: Spiking Neural Network for Energy-Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06530/) (2019)
- [Recurrent Vision Transformers for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05598/) (2022)
- [AEGNN: Asynchronous Event-based Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17149/) (2022)
- [A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08499/) (2020)
- [Event-based Asynchronous Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09148/) (2020)
- [A Unified Multi-scale Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07155/) (2016)
- [Inside-Outside Net: Detecting Objects in Context with Skip Pooling and Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04143/) (2015)
- [Object Detection with Spiking Neural Networks on Automotive Event Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04339/) (2022)
- [Deep Directly-Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11411/) (2023)
- [Event-based Video Reconstruction via Potential-assisted Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10943/) (2022)
- [Asynchronous Convolutional Networks for Object Detection in Neuromorphic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07931/) (2018)
- [Graph-based Asynchronous Event Processing for Rapid Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14419/) (2023)
- [HyperNet: Towards Accurate Region Proposal Generation and Joint Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00600/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Object Detection using Event Camera: A MoE Heat Conduction based Detector and A New Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06647/) (2024)
- [A Recurrent YOLOv8-based framework for Event-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05321/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Event Stream Slicing for Open-Vocabulary Event-Based Object Detection via Vision-Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00681/) (2025)
- [Frequency-Adaptive Low-Latency Object Detection Using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04149/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Spiking Vision Transformer for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07715/) (2025)
- [CM3AE: A Unified RGB Frame and Event-Voxel/-Frame Pre-training Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12576/) (2025)
- [Edge Intelligence with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14069/) (2025)
- [Learning to utilize image second-order derivative information for crisp edge detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05779/) (2024)
- [Spiking Neural Network Feature Discrimination Boosts Modality Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10423/) (2025)
- [EHGCN: Hierarchical Euclidean-Hyperbolic Fusion via Motion-Aware GCN for Hybrid Event Stream Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16616/) (2025)
- [SPKLIP: Aligning Spike Video Streams with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12656/) (2025)
- [SparseVoxelDet: Fully Sparse Voxel Networks for Efficient Event-Based Drone Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21638/) (2026)
- [BiSpikCLM: A Spiking Language Model integrating Softmax-Free Spiking Attention and Spike-Aware Alignment Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13859/) (2026)
- [Chimera: A Block-Based Neural Architecture Search Framework for Event-Based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19646/) (2024)
- [SAFA-SNN: Sparsity-Aware On-Device Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning with Fast-Adaptive Structure of Spiking Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03648/) (2025)
- [MS2Edge: Towards Energy-Efficient and Crisp Edge Detection with Multi-Scale Residual Learning in SNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13735/) (2025)
- [Sensor Generalization for Adaptive Sensing in Event-based Object Detection via Joint Distribution Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23357/) (2026)
- [AceleradorSNN: A Neuromorphic Cognitive System Integrating Spiking Neural Networks and DynamicImage Signal Processing on FPGA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28429/) (2026)
- [Neuromorphic Object Detection: An In-Depth Study and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23576/) (2026)
- [Sequence-SOD: Bio-inspired Sequence-aware Spiking ObjectDetection for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26703/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras, characterized by high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth, offer unique capabilities for object detection in specialized contexts. Despite these advantages, the inherent sparsity and asynchrony of event data pose challenges to existing object detection algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the way the human brain codes and processes information, offer a potential solution to these difficulties. However, their performance in object detection using event cameras is limited in current implementations. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Fusion Object Detector (SFOD), a simple and efficient approach to SNN-based object detection. Specifically, we design a Spiking Fusion Module, achieving the first-time fusion of feature maps from different scales in SNNs applied to event cameras. Additionally, through integrating our analysis and experiments conducted during the pretraining of the backbone network on the NCAR dataset, we delve deeply into the impact of spiking decoding strategies and loss functions on model performance. Thereby, we establish state-of-the-art classification results based on SNNs, achieving 93.7% accuracy on the NCAR dataset. Experimental results on the GEN1 detection dataset demonstrate that the SFOD achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 32.1%, outperforming existing SNN-based approaches. Our research not only underscores the potential of SNNs in object detection with event cameras but also propels the advancement of SNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/yimeng-fan/SFOD.