The spike gating flow: A hierarchical structure-based spiking neural network for online gesture recognition

Abstract

Action recognition is an exciting research avenue for artificial intelligence since it may be a game changer in emerging industrial fields such as robotic visions and automobiles. However, current deep learning (DL) faces major challenges for such applications because of the huge computational cost and inefficient learning. Hence, we developed a novel brain-inspired spiking neural network (SNN) based system titled spiking gating flow (SGF) for online action learning. The developed system consists of multiple SGF units which are assembled in a hierarchical manner. A single SGF unit contains three layers: a feature extraction layer, an event-driven layer, and a histogram-based training layer. To demonstrate the capability of the developed system, we employed a standard dynamic vision sensor (DVS) gesture classification as a benchmark. The results indicated that we can achieve 87.5% of accuracy which is comparable with DL, but at a smaller training/inference data number ratio of 1.5:1. Only a single training epoch is required during the learning process. Meanwhile, to the best of our knowledge, this is the highest accuracy among the non-backpropagation based SNNs. Finally, we conclude the few-shot learning (FSL) paradigm of the developed network: 1) a hierarchical structure-based network design involves prior human knowledge; 2) SNNs for content-based global dynamic feature detection.