Brain-guided manifold transferring to improve the performance of spiking neural networks in image classification.

Journal: Journal of computational neuroscience
Published Date:

Abstract

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), as the third generation of neural networks, are based on biological models of human brain neurons. In this work, a shallow SNN plays the role of an explicit image decoder in the image classification. An LSTM-based EEG encoder is used to construct the EEG-based feature space, which is a discriminative space in viewpoint of classification accuracy by SVM. Then, the visual feature vectors extracted from SNN is mapped to the EEG-based discriminative features space by manifold transferring based on mutual k-Nearest Neighbors (Mk-NN MT). This proposed "Brain-guided system" improves the separability of the SNN-based visual feature space. In the test phase, the spike patterns extracted by SNN from the input image is mapped to LSTM-based EEG feature space, and then classified without need for the EEG signals. The SNN-based image encoder is trained by the conversion method and the results are evaluated and compared with other training methods on the challenging small ImageNet-EEG dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed transferring the manifold of the SNN-based feature space to LSTM-based EEG feature space leads to 14.25% improvement at most in the accuracy of image classification. Thus, embedding SNN in the brain-guided system which is trained on a small set, improves its performance in image classification.

Authors

  • Zahra Imani
    Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran.
  • Mehdi Ezoji
    Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran. Electronic address: m.ezoji@nit.ac.ir.
  • Timothée Masquelier
    CERCO UMR 5549, CNRS-Université de Toulouse 3, F-31300, France.