Performance of e/gamma-based triggers at the CMS High Level Trigger

The trigger systems of the LHC detectors play a crucial role in determining the physics capabilities of the experiments. A reduction of several orders of magnitude of the event rate is needed to reach values compatible with the detector readout, offline storage and analysis capabilities. The CMS experiment has been designed with a two-level trigger system the Level 1 (L1) Trigger, implemented on custom-designed electronics, and the High Level Trigger (HLT), a streamlined version of the CMS reconstruction and analysis software running on a computer farm.In order to achieve a good rate reduction with as little as possible impact on the physics efficiency, the algorithms used at HLT are designed to follow as closely as possible the ones used in the offline reconstruction. Here, we will present the algorithms used for the online reconstruction of electrons and photons, both at L1 and HLT, and their performance. We will show how some of these triggers contributed to the 2012 physics results. We will further present the planned improvements of these HLT objects focusing on the deployment of a new superclustering algorithm allowing pileup mitigation, a new Particle Flow-based isolation, and a dedicated track fitting algorithm based on a Gaussian Sum Filter for the electrons reconstruction.