# Lossy Event Compression: From Event Stream Distortion to Task Performance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28429/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [The Event-Camera Dataset and Simulator: Event-based Data for Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry, and SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08336/) (2016)
- [Recurrent Vision Transformers for Object Detection with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05598/) (2022)
- [E-RAFT: Dense Optical Flow from Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10552/) (2021)
- [A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08499/) (2020)
- [HyperE2VID: Improving Event-Based Video Reconstruction via Hypernetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06382/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Vision Sensors for Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04667/) (2018)
- [Neuromorphic Vision Data Coding: Classifying and Reviewing the Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07050/) (2024)
- [Flow-Based Visual Stream Compression for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08086/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-based Event Data Coding: A Joint Spatiotemporal and Polarity Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03285/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras generate asynchronous, sparse data streams with microsecond temporal resolution, but in moderate-to-high motion scenes they can produce as many as hundreds of millions of events per second, creating significant bandwidth and storage challenges. Lossy compression is therefore essential for practical deployment, yet existing event stream distortion metrics fail to reliably predict compression-induced degradation at the task level, forcing codec optimization to rely on expensive task-specific evaluations. To address this gap, this paper introduces two fundamentally different event compression pipelines: i) an aggregation-based pipeline that converts the event stream into polarity-based histogram frames for compression with the conventional image codec JPEG 2000, and ii) a frame-free point cloud-based pipeline that codes events natively as 3D points using the octree-based codec G-PCC. Both pipelines are then assessed within a unified task-driven evaluation framework that relates event stream distortion to downstream application performance across four representative tasks: i) video reconstruction, ii) object detection, iii) optical flow estimation, and a delay-sensitive task iv) asynchronous feature tracking under a reference-relative protocol. Building on this framework, five classification-based distortion metrics are applied to event compression for the first time, to the best of the authors' knowledge, and benchmarked against existing event stream metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed metrics reliably predict compression-induced task degradation across different coding frameworks. This demonstrates that event stream distortion assessment can be an efficient alternative to repeated task-specific evaluation, providing direct guidance for the development and optimization of future event data coding solutions.