Efficient visual object representation using a biologically plausible spike-latency code and winner-take-all inhibition
This work addresses the need for more energy-efficient and biologically plausible vision systems, though it is incremental in applying known SNN methods to a specific dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of inefficient object recognition in deep neural networks by developing a spiking neural network model that uses spike-latency coding and winner-take-all inhibition, achieving efficient representation of Fashion MNIST objects with as little as 40 spikes using 150 neurons.
Deep neural networks have surpassed human performance in key visual challenges such as object recognition, but require a large amount of energy, computation, and memory. In contrast, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have the potential to improve both the efficiency and biological plausibility of object recognition systems. Here we present a SNN model that uses spike-latency coding and winner-take-all inhibition (WTA-I) to efficiently represent visual stimuli from the Fashion MNIST dataset. Stimuli were preprocessed with center-surround receptive fields and then fed to a layer of spiking neurons whose synaptic weights were updated using spike-timing-dependent-plasticity (STDP). We investigate how the quality of the represented objects changes under different WTA-I schemes and demonstrate that a network of 150 spiking neurons can efficiently represent objects with as little as 40 spikes. Studying how core object recognition may be implemented using biologically plausible learning rules in SNNs may not only further our understanding of the brain, but also lead to novel and efficient artificial vision systems.