# BlinkTrack: Feature Tracking over 80 FPS via Events and Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ByteTrack: Multi-Object Tracking by Associating Every Detection Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06864/) (2021)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11918/) (2022)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [EV-FlowNet: Self-Supervised Optical Flow Estimation for Event-based Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06898/) (2018)
- [Particle Video Revisited: Tracking Through Occlusions Using Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04153/) (2022)
- [The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator: Event-based Data for Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry, and SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08336/) (2016)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Deep Patch Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04726/) (2022)
- [Recurrent Vision Transformers for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05598/) (2022)
- [FILM: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04901/) (2022)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [EventGPT: Event Stream Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00832/) (2024)
- [Event6D: Event-based Novel Object 6D Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28045/) (2026)
- [TETO: Tracking Events with Teacher Observation for Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23487/) (2026)
- [GoStop: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Temporal Aggregation in Event-Based Feature Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15699/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras, known for their high temporal resolution and ability to capture asynchronous changes, have gained significant attention for their potential in feature tracking, especially in challenging conditions. However, event cameras lack the fine-grained texture information that conventional cameras provide, leading to error accumulation in tracking. To address this, we propose a novel framework, BlinkTrack, which integrates event data with grayscale images for high-frequency feature tracking. Our method extends the traditional Kalman filter into a learning-based framework, utilizing differentiable Kalman filters in both event and image branches. This approach improves single-modality tracking and effectively solves the data association and fusion from asynchronous event and image data. We also introduce new synthetic and augmented datasets to better evaluate our model. Experimental results indicate that BlinkTrack significantly outperforms existing methods, exceeding 80 FPS with multi-modality data and 100 FPS with preprocessed event data. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/ColieShen/BlinkTrack.