Benchmarking Recurrent Event-Based Object Detection for Industrial Multi-Class Recognition on MTEvent

Abstract: Event cameras are attractive for industrial robotics because they provide high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and reduced motion blur. However, most event-based object detection studies focus on outdoor driving scenarios or limited class settings. In this work, we benchmark recurrent ReYOLOv8s on MTEvent for industrial multi-class recognition and use a non-recurrent YOLOv8s variant as a baseline to analyze the effect of temporal memory. On the MTEvent validation split, the best scratch recurrent model (C21) reaches 0.285 mAP50, corresponding to a 9.6% relative improvement over the nonrecurrent YOLOv8s baseline (0.260). Event-domain pretraining has a stronger effect: GEN1-initialized fine-tuning yields the best overall result of 0.329 mAP50 at clip length 21, and unlike scratch training, GEN1-pretrained models improve consistently with clip length. PEDRo initialization drops to 0.251, indicating that mismatched source-domain pretraining can be less effective than training from scratch. Persistent failure modes are dominated by class imbalance and human-object interaction. Overall, we position this work as a focused benchmarking and analysis study of recurrent event-based detection in industrial environments.