Event-based computation for touch localization based on precise spike timing

Germain Haessig, Moritz B. Milde, Pau Vilimelis Aceituno, Omar Oubari, James C. Knight, Andre van Schaik, Ryad B. Benosman, Giacomo Indiveri

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Precise spike timing and temporal coding are used extensively within the nervous system of insects and in the sensory periphery of higher order animals. However, conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and machine learning algorithms cannot take advantage of this coding strategy, due to their rate-based representation of signals. Even in the case of artificial Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), identifying applications where temporal coding outperforms the rate coding strategies of ANNs is still an open challenge. Neuromorphic sensory-processing systems provide an ideal context for exploring the potential advantages of temporal coding, as they are able to efficiently extract the information required to cluster or classify spatio-temporal activity patterns from relative spike timing. Here we propose a neuromorphic model inspired by the sand scorpion to explore the benefits of temporal coding, and validate it in an event-based sensory-processing task. The task consists in localizing a target using only the relative spike timing of eight spatially-separated vibration sensors. We propose two different approaches in which the SNNs learns to cluster spatio-temporal patterns in an unsupervised manner and we demonstrate how the task can be solved both analytically and through numerical simulation of multiple SNN models. We argue that the models presented are optimal for spatio-temporal pattern classification using precise spike timing in a task that could be used as a standard benchmark for evaluating event-based sensory processing models based on temporal coding.
Original languageEnglish
Article number420
Number of pages19
JournalFrontiers in Neuroscience
Volume14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Open Access - Access Right Statement

© 2020 Haessig, Milde, Aceituno, Oubari, Knight, van Schaik, Benosman and Indiveri. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Keywords

  • neural networks (computer science)
  • neuromorphics

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