A Systematic Survey on Event Camera Representation Learning

Abstract

Event cameras offer distinctive advantages, including microsecond-level latency and high dynamic range, rendering them promising for challenging perception tasks. Inspired by biological vision, they output asynchronous and sparse event streams rather than dense image frames, creating a fundamental mismatch with mainstream neural networks. This survey reviews recent advances in event camera representation learning from the perspective of converting raw event streams into learnable representations. We first organize existing methods according to whether they rely on a single principal event representation or jointly exploit multiple complementary representations. Single-representation methods are further categorized into dense-based representations, which regularize events into structured grid-like forms, and sparse-based representations, which preserve event-native discrete spatio-temporal structures. Multi-representation methods are organized into dense-dense and dense-sparse hybrid formulations that exploit complementary representation properties. This representation-centric taxonomy clarifies how different paradigms balance structural regularity, temporal fidelity, sparsity preservation, and architectural compatibility. For each paradigm, we examine the underlying design choices, modeling principles, and task-level implications. We further summarize standard benchmarks and evaluation settings across representative high-level perception and low-level vision tasks. Finally, we discuss open problems and outline future directions from fixed representation design toward adaptive representation optimization, improved fidelity-efficiency trade-offs, and more scalable event-based perception systems.