GET: Group Event Transformer for Event-Based Vision

Abstract

Event cameras are a type of novel neuromorphic sensor that has been gaining increasing attention. Existing event-based backbones mainly rely on image-based designs to extract spatial information within the image transformed from events, overlooking important event properties like time and polarity. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-based vision Transformer backbone for Event-based vision, called Group Event Transformer (GET), which decouples temporal-polarity information from spatial information throughout the feature extraction process. Specifically, we first propose a new event representation for GET, named Group Token, which groups asynchronous events based on their timestamps and polarities. Then, GET applies the Event Dual Self-Attention block, and Group Token Aggregation module to facilitate effective feature communication and integration in both the spatial and temporal-polarity domains. After that, GET can be integrated with different downstream tasks by connecting it with various heads. We evaluate our method on four event-based classification datasets (Cifar10-DVS, N-MNIST, N-CARS, and DVS128Gesture) and two event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1), and the results demonstrate that GET outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Peterande/GET-Group-Event-Transformer.