Retain, Blend, and Exchange: A Quality-aware Spatial-Stereo Fusion Approach for Event Stream Recognition

Abstract

Existing event stream-based pattern recognition models usually represent the event stream as the point cloud, voxel, image, etc., and design various deep neural networks to learn their features. Although considerable results can be achieved in simple cases, however, the model performance may be limited by monotonous modality expressions, sub-optimal fusion, and readout mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-stream framework for event stream-based pattern recognition via differentiated fusion, termed EFV++. It models two common event representations simultaneously, i.e., event images and event voxels. The spatial and three-dimensional stereo information can be learned separately by utilizing Transformer and Graph Neural Network (GNN). We believe the features of each representation still contain both efficient and redundant features and a sub-optimal solution may be obtained if we directly fuse them without differentiation. Thus, we divide each feature into three levels and retain high-quality features, blend medium-quality features, and exchange low-quality features. The enhanced dual features will be fed into the fusion Transformer together with bottleneck features. In addition, we introduce a novel hybrid interaction readout mechanism to enhance the diversity of features as final representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple widely used event stream-based classification datasets. Specifically, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the Bullying10k dataset, i.e., $90.51\%$, which exceeds the second place by $+2.21\%$. The source code of this paper has been released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/EFV_event_classification/tree/EFVpp}.