Asynchronous Collaborative Graph Representation for Frames and Events

Integrating frames and events has become a widely accepted solution for various tasks in challenging scenarios. However, most multimodal methods directly convert events into image-like formats synchronized with frames and process each stream through separate two-branch backbones, making it difficult to fully exploit the spatiotemporal events while limiting inference frequency to the frame rate. To address these problems, we propose a novel asynchronous collaborative graph representation, namely ACGR, which is the first trial to explore a unified graph framework for asynchronously processing frames and events with high performance and low latency. Technically, we first construct unimodal graphs for frames and events to preserve their spatiotemporal properties and sparsity. Then, an asynchronous collaborative alignment module is designed to align and fuse frames and events into a unified graph and the ACGR is generated through graph convolutional networks. Finally, we innovatively introduce domain adaptation to enable cross-modal interactions between frames and events by aligning their feature spaces. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both object detection and depth estimation tasks, while significantly reducing computational latency and achieving real-time inference up to 200 Hz. Our code will be open-sourced and available in the supplementary material.