# Towards Low-Latency Event Stream-based Visual Object Tracking: A Slow-Fast Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12903 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12903/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04730/) (2020)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Learning Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17154/) (2021)
- [Learning Discriminative Model Prediction for Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07220/) (2019)
- [Joint Feature Learning and Relation Modeling for Tracking: A One-Stream Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11991/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [ATOM: Accurate Tracking by Overlap Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07628/) (2018)
- [MixFormer: End-to-End Tracking with Iterative Mixed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11082/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic Regression for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12565/) (2020)
- [Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11681/) (2021)
- [SiamFC++: Towards Robust and Accurate Visual Tracking with Target Estimation Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06188/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10035/) (2023)
- [Audiovisual SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08740/) (2020)
- [AiATrack: Attention in Attention for Transformer Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09603/) (2022)
- [VisEvent: Reliable Object Tracking via Collaboration of Frame and Event Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05015/) (2021)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16746/) (2021)
- [Know Your Surroundings: Exploiting Scene Information for Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11014/) (2020)
- [Backbone is All Your Need: A Simplified Architecture for Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05328/) (2022)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [AEGNN: Asynchronous Event-based Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17149/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Optimizing Multi-Modality Trackers via Significance-Regularized Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17488/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Pondering Sparsity-aware Mixture-of-Experts Transformer for Event Stream based Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06112/) (2026)
- [E-TraMamba: A New Paradigm for Efficient Long-Term 3D Feature Tracking with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02866/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing tracking algorithms typically rely on low-frame-rate RGB cameras coupled with computationally intensive deep neural network architectures to achieve effective tracking. However, such frame-based methods inherently face challenges in achieving low-latency performance and often fail in resource-constrained environments. Visual object tracking using bio-inspired event cameras has emerged as a promising research direction in recent years, offering distinct advantages for low-latency applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Slow-Fast Tracking paradigm that flexibly adapts to different operational requirements, termed SFTrack. The proposed framework supports two complementary modes, i.e., a high-precision slow tracker for scenarios with sufficient computational resources, and an efficient fast tracker tailored for latency-aware, resource-constrained environments. Specifically, our framework first performs graph-based representation learning from high-temporal-resolution event streams, and then integrates the learned graph-structured information into two FlashAttention-based vision backbones, yielding the slow and fast trackers, respectively. The fast tracker achieves low latency through a lightweight network design and by producing multiple bounding box outputs in a single forward pass. Finally, we seamlessly combine both trackers via supervised fine-tuning and further enhance the fast tracker's performance through a knowledge distillation strategy. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks, including FE240, COESOT, and EventVOT, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method across different real-world scenarios. The source code has been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/SlowFast_Event_Track.