# Frequency-domain Event-based Imaging for Selective Surveillance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15392/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [HATS: Histograms of Averaged Time Surfaces for Robust Event-based Object Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07913/) (2018)
- [Event-based Vision meets Deep Learning on Steering Prediction for Self-driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01310/) (2018)
- [Events-to-Video: Bringing Modern Computer Vision to Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08298/) (2019)
- [Back to Event Basics: Self-Supervised Learning of Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras via Photometric Constancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08283/) (2020)
- [Learning Event-Based Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05794/) (2020)
- [Object Detection with Spiking Neural Networks on Automotive Event Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04339/) (2022)
- [How to Calibrate Your Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12362/) (2021)
- [Seeing Motion at Nighttime with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11884/) (2024)
- [FRED: The Florence RGB-Event Drone Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05163/) (2025)
- [Neuromorphic Drone Detection: an Event-RGB Multimodal Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16099/) (2024)
- [EventLFM: Event Camera integrated Fourier Light Field Microscopy for Ultrafast 3D imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00730/) (2023)
- [Drone Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04564/) (2025)
- [A PyTorch-Enabled Tool for Synthetic Event Camera Data Generation and Algorithm Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09754/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event-based cameras (EBCs) are an attractive sensing modality for surveillance due to their reporting of pixel-level radiance changes with microsecond resolution and high dynamic range, enabling motion extraction while suppressing background. Their asynchronous, sparse output, however, necessitate algorithms that identify targets in event-space without processing full frames. We introduce Frequency Rate Information for Event Space (FRIES), a neuromorphic processing framework that detects periodicity in events, such as rotor rotation and mechanical vibrations, to discriminate and monitor man-made objects. FRIES first applies a time gate to suppress background and noise, then aggregates events into a pixel-wise activity (e.g., density) map and clusters pixels into regions-of-interest (ROIs). A localized spectral analysis is applied to each ROI to extract dominant frequencies used to distinguish structured object signatures from unstructured background and noise. Discriminated targets are visualized using a Resonant Time Surface (RTS), a frequency-selective method that weights events by their phase coherence with the extracted frequencies, rewarding in-sync content and suppressing out-of-sync clutter. We demonstrate FRIES and RTS in a controlled indoor experiment to recover the rotational frequency of a mechanical chopper and drone rotors against a moving background. We further test these methods on an outdoor data to detect a hovering drone against a realistic treeline. These preliminary results establish frequency-domain event processing as a promising front-end for selective surveillance in neuromorphic pipelines and a complementary surveillance modality, leveraging the high temporal resolution to enable spectral discrimination.