Spiking PointNet: Spiking Neural Networks for Point Clouds
This work addresses the underexplored area of SNNs for 3D recognition, offering energy-efficient solutions for point cloud processing, though it is incremental in adapting existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of applying Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to 3D point cloud recognition by introducing Spiking PointNet, which overcomes training obstacles and computational costs, achieving better performance than its ANN counterpart on ModelNet datasets with significant speedup and storage savings.
Recently, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), enjoying extreme energy efficiency, have drawn much research attention on 2D visual recognition and shown gradually increasing application potential. However, it still remains underexplored whether SNNs can be generalized to 3D recognition. To this end, we present Spiking PointNet in the paper, the first spiking neural model for efficient deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the two huge obstacles limiting the application of SNNs in point clouds are: the intrinsic optimization obstacle of SNNs that impedes the training of a big spiking model with large time steps, and the expensive memory and computation cost of PointNet that makes training a big spiking point model unrealistic. To solve the problems simultaneously, we present a trained-less but learning-more paradigm for Spiking PointNet with theoretical justifications and in-depth experimental analysis. In specific, our Spiking PointNet is trained with only a single time step but can obtain better performance with multiple time steps inference, compared to the one trained directly with multiple time steps. We conduct various experiments on ModelNet10, ModelNet40 to demonstrate the effectiveness of Spiking PointNet. Notably, our Spiking PointNet even can outperform its ANN counterpart, which is rare in the SNN field thus providing a potential research direction for the following work. Moreover, Spiking PointNet shows impressive speedup and storage saving in the training phase.