Hierarchical Sparse Graph for Multi-dimensional Assignment in Event-based Tracking

Muxi Zha, Yang Shang, Wenlong Zhang, Qifeng Yu, Banglei Guan

Existing event-based tracking methods typically operate in an online manner, associating tracklets across adjacent batches. However, this limited temporal window often leads to failures in challenging scenarios, such as long-term occlusions or missed detections, where broader temporal context should be incorporated for high-precision tracking. To achieve robust and accurate tracking, this paper concentrates on the event-based multi-dimensional assignment that associates tracklets across multiple batches simultaneously. Unlike image-based detectors, event-based detectors can generate multiple correct yet spatially distinct tracklets for a single object per batch. This violates the one-to-one rule in classic data association, making event-based association an underdetermined many-to-many matching problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle this NP-hard problem. To address its underdetermined nature, we formulate the assignment problem via fuzzy logic, where pairwise tracklet correlations are quantified through multiple long-range kinematic metrics. This fuzzy design eliminates the need for hard tracking thresholds and enables multiple heterogeneous…