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 uni-modal 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 can be available at https://github.com/dianzl/ACGR.