PEOD: A Pixel-Aligned Event-RGB Benchmark for Object Detection Under Challenging Conditions

Abstract Robust object detection for challenging scenarios increasingly relies on event cameras, yet existing Event-RGB datasets remain constrained by sparse coverage of extreme conditions and low spatial resolution (≤ 640 × 480), which prevents comprehensive evaluation of detectors under challenging scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PEOD, the first large-scale, pixel-aligned and hign-resolution (1280 × 720) Event-RGB dataset for object detection under challenge conditions. PEOD contains 130+ spatiotemporal-aligned sequences and 340k manual bounding boxes, with 57% of data captured under low-light, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Furthermore, we benchmark 14 methods across three input configurations (Event-based, RGB-based, and Event-RGB fusion) on PEOD. On the full test set and normal subset, fusion-based models achieve the excellent performance. However, in illumination challenge subset, the top event-based model outperforms all fusion models, while fusion models still outperform their RGB-based counterparts, indicating limits of existing fusion methods when the frame modality is severely degraded. PEOD establishes a realistic, high-quality benchmark for multimodal perception and will be publicly released later to facilitate future research.