Spiking Neural Networks for event-based action recognition: a new task to understand their advantage

Alex Vicente-Sola*, Davide L. Manna, Paul Kirkland, Gaetano Di Caterina, Trevor J. Bihl

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
17 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are characterised by their unique temporal dynamics, but the properties and advantages of such computations are still not well understood. In order to provide answers, in this work we demonstrate how Spiking neurons can enable temporal feature extraction in feed-forward neural networks without the need for recurrent synapses, and how recurrent SNNs can achieve comparable results to LSTM with a smaller number of parameters. This shows how their bio-inspired computing principles can be successfully exploited beyond energy efficiency gains and evidences their differences with respect to conventional artificial neural networks. These results are obtained through a new task, DVS-Gesture-Chain (DVS-GC), which allows, for the first time, to evaluate the perception of temporal dependencies in a real event-based action recognition dataset. Our study proves how the widely used DVS Gesture benchmark can be solved by networks without temporal feature extraction when its events are accumulated in frames, unlike the new DVS-GC which demands an understanding of the order in which events happen. Furthermore, this setup allowed us to reveal the role of the leakage rate in spiking neurons for temporal processing tasks and demonstrated the benefits of ”hard reset” mechanisms. Additionally, we also show how time-dependent weights and normalisation can lead to understanding order by means of temporal attention. Code for the DVS-GC task is available.

Original languageEnglish
Article number128657
Number of pages11
JournalNeurocomputing
Volume611
Early online date28 Sept 2024
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2025

Keywords

  • Spiking Neural Networks
  • neuromorphic
  • action recognition
  • event camera
  • dynamic vision sensor
  • spatio-temporal feature extraction

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