# Static in Frames, Dynamic in Events: Rethinking Features in Event Cameras as Motion Cues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11075/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Event-based Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08156/) (2018)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [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)
- [A Unifying Contrast Maximization Framework for Event Cameras, with Applications to Motion, Depth, and Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01306/) (2018)
- [E-RAFT: Dense Optical Flow from Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10552/) (2021)
- [Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00167/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Event-Based Optical Flow with Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01862/) (2021)
- [Secrets of Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10022/) (2022)
- [Focus Is All You Need: Loss Functions For Event-based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07235/) (2019)
- [Time-Ordered Recent Event (TORE) Volumes for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06108/) (2021)
- [Learning Dense and Continuous Optical Flow from an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09078/) (2022)
- [Taming Contrast Maximization for Learning Sequential, Low-latency, Event-based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05214/) (2023)
- [TMA: Temporal Motion Aggregation for Event-based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11629/) (2023)
- [EVIMO2: An Event Camera Dataset for Motion Segmentation, Optical Flow, Structure from Motion, and Visual Inertial Odometry in Indoor Scenes with Monocular or Stereo Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03467/) (2022)
- [Lightweight Event-based Optical Flow Estimation via Iterative Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13726/) (2022)
- [FA-Harris: A Fast and Asynchronous Corner Detector for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10925/) (2019)
- [RPEFlow: Multimodal Fusion of RGB-PointCloud-Event for Joint Optical Flow and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15082/) (2023)
- [EventPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description for Event-based Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00210/) (2021)
- [Motion-prior Contrast Maximization for Dense Continuous-Time Motion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10802/) (2024)
- [LuvHarris: A Practical Corner Detector for Event-cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11443/) (2021)
- [Bridge Frame and Event: Common Spatiotemporal Fusion for High-Dynamic Scene Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06992/) (2025)
- [Making Every Event Count: Balancing Data Efficiency and Accuracy in Event Camera Subsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21187/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras capture intensity changes asynchronously with high temporal resolution, requiring novel preprocessing methods for downstream tasks. Unlike static intensity snapshots, event data inherently encode information about scene dynamics and object motion, meaning that features derived from events can exhibit behaviors with no direct analogue in frame-based vision. In this paper, we analyze two features used in event-based corner detection---the eigenvalues of the structure tensor and the spatiotemporal density values---and show that they are motion cues. We hypothesize that these features, combined with local geometric information, can enhance motion estimation tasks. To validate this, we first theoretically analyze how the eigenvalues of the structure tensor at moving corner points relate to the direction of motion. We then design controlled experiments on a synthetic dataset, confirming that extending local geometric features with eigenvalues and density values provides complementary motion information and is robust to texture and shot noise. Finally, we integrate the proposed features into a state-of-the-art event-based optical flow network and evaluate on the real-world DSEC benchmark, where the added features consistently improve accuracy, with the largest gains in data-scarce scenarios and for lower-capacity models. The code for this paper can be found at: hrefhttps://github.com/hesamaraghi/static-in-frames-dynamic-in-eventshttps://github.com/hesamaraghi/static-in-frames-dynamic-in-events.