# ETAP: Event-based Tracking of Any Point

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00133/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06664/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08245/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Video to Events: Recycling Video Datasets for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03095/) (2019)
- [FILM: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04901/) (2022)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [Event-aided Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07640/) (2022)
- [RoboTAP: Tracking Arbitrary Points for Few-Shot Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15975/) (2023)
- [Local All-Pair Correspondence for Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15420/) (2024)
- [TALLFormer: Temporal Action Localization with a Long-memory Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01680/) (2022)
- [QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06984/) (2022)
- [LEAP-VO: Long-term Effective Any Point Tracking for Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01887/) (2024)
- [From Chaos Comes Order: Ordering Event Representations for Object Recognition and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13455/) (2023)
- [Speed Invariant Time Surface for Learning to Detect Corner Points with Event-Based Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11332/) (2019)
- [Dense Continuous-Time Optical Flow from Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13674/) (2022)
- [A Voxel Graph CNN for Object Classification with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00216/) (2021)
- [BlinkFlow: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Event-based Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07716/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Event6D: Event-based Novel Object 6D Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28045/) (2026)
- [TAPFormer: Robust Arbitrary Point Tracking via Transient Asynchronous Fusion of Frames and Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04989/) (2026)
- [TETO: Tracking Events with Teacher Observation for Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23487/) (2026)
- [Match-Any-Events: Zero-Shot Motion-Robust Feature Matching Across Wide Baselines for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18744/) (2026)
- [E-TraMamba: A New Paradigm for Efficient Long-Term 3D Feature Tracking with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02866/) (2026)
- [EVIS: Real-Time Event Camera Simulation with Multimodal Supervision in NVIDIA Isaac Sim](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08098/) (2026)
- [Equivariant Filter for High Performance Image Tracking using an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09103/) (2026)
- [GoStop: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Temporal Aggregation in Event-Based Feature Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15699/) (2026)
- [E-WAVE: Event-based Continuous Optical Flow via Warping-Aligned Visual Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34346/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tracking any point (TAP) recently shifted the motion estimation paradigm from focusing on individual salient points with local templates to tracking arbitrary points with global image contexts. However, while research has mostly focused on driving the accuracy of models in nominal settings, addressing scenarios with difficult lighting conditions and high-speed motions remains out of reach due to the limitations of the sensor. This work addresses this challenge with the first event camera-based TAP method. It leverages the high temporal resolution and high dynamic range of event cameras for robust high-speed tracking, and the global contexts in TAP methods to handle asynchronous and sparse event measurements. We further extend the TAP framework to handle event feature variations induced by motion -- thereby addressing an open challenge in purely event-based tracking -- with a novel feature-alignment loss which ensures the learning of motion-robust features. Our method is trained with data from a new data generation pipeline and systematically ablated across all design decisions. Our method shows strong cross-dataset generalization and performs 136% better on the average Jaccard metric than the baselines. Moreover, on an established feature tracking benchmark, it achieves a 20% improvement over the previous best event-only method and even surpasses the previous best events-and-frames method by 4.1%. Our code is available at https://github.com/tub-rip/ETAP