Efficient Converted Spiking Neural Network for 3D and 2D Classification

Abstract

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted enormous research interest due to their low-power and biologically plausible nature. Existing ANN-SNN conversion methods can achieve lossless conversion by converting a well-trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) into an SNN. However, converted SNN requires a large amount of time steps to achieve competitive performance with the well-trained ANN, which means a large latency. In this paper, we propose an efficient unified ANN-SNN conversion method for point cloud classification and image classification to significantly reduce the time step to meet the fast and lossless ANN-SNN transformation. Specifically, we first adaptively adjust the threshold according to the activation state of spiking neurons, ensuring a certain proportion of spiking neurons are activated at each time step to reduce the time for accumulation of membrane potential. Next, we use an adaptive firing mechanism to enlarge the range of spiking output, getting more discrimination features in short time steps. Extensive experimental results on challenging point cloud and image datasets demonstrate that the suggested approach significantly outmatches state-of-the-art ANN-SNN conversion based methods.