Krishna Vinod, Joseph Raj Vishal, Kaustav Chanda et al. · 2026-01-01
Tracking skiers in RGB broadcast footage is challenging due to motion blur, static overlays, and clutter that obscure the fast-moving athlete. Event cameras, with their asynchronous contrast sensing, offer natural robustness to such artifacts, yet a controlled benchmark for winter-sport tracking has been missing. We introduce event SkiTB (eSkiTB), a synthetic event-based ski tracking dataset generated from SkiTB using direct video-to-event conversion without neural interpolation, enabling an iso-informational comparison between RGB and event modalities. Benchmarking SDTrack (spiking transformer) against STARK (RGB transformer), we find that event-based tracking is substantially resilient to broadcast clutter in scenes dominated by static overlays, achieving 0.685 IoU, outperforming RGB by +20.0 points. Across the dataset, SDTrack attains a mean IoU of 0.711, demonstrating that temporal contrast is a reliable cue for tracking ballistic motion in visually congested environments. eSkiTB establishes the first controlled setting for event-based tracking in winter sports and highlights the promise of event cameras for ski tracking. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/eventbasedvision/eSkiTB.
Research question
How can future research validate the synthetic results using smaller, real-world validation sets?
Methodology
eSkiTB is a synthetic dataset generated from SkiTB using direct video-to-event conversion without neural interpolation.
Conclusions
The study demonstrates that event-based tracking methods are resilient to broadcast clutter and outperform RGB by 10 points in IoU metrics across the eSkiTB dataset.
Importance
eSkiTB provides a new benchmark for event-based tracking in winter sports, highlighting temporal contrast as a reliable cue for tracking ballistic motion in visually congested environments.
Open gap
The system's design aims to test event representations and motivate adaptive approaches for handling large aerial excursions in fixed-grid voxelization.
Future research
Concrete next steps proposed include validating the synthetic results using smaller, real-world validation sets and incorporating an event-specific aerial motion model for improved recognition accuracy in low-resolution sequences.