Sparser spiking activity can be better: Feature Refine-and-Mask spiking neural network for event-based visual recognition

Event-based visual, a new visual paradigm with bio-inspired dynamic perception and μs level temporal resolution, has prominent advantages in many specific visual scenarios and gained much research interest. Spiking neural network (SNN) is naturally suitable for dealing with event streams due to its temporal information processing capability and event-driven nature. However, existing works SNN neglect the fact that the input event streams are spatially sparse and temporally non-uniform, and just treat these variant inputs equally. This situation interferes with the effectiveness and efficiency of existing SNNs. In this paper, we propose the feature Refine-and-Mask SNN (RM-SNN), which has the ability of self-adaption to regulate the spiking response in a data-dependent way. We use the Refine-and-Mask (RM) module to refine all features and mask the unimportant features to optimize the membrane potential of spiking neurons, which in turn drops the spiking activity. Inspired by the fact that not all events in spatio-temporal streams are task-relevant, we execute the RM module in both temporal and channel dimensions. Extensive experiments on seven event-based benchmarks, DVS128 Gesture, DVS128 Gait, CIFAR10-DVS, N-Caltech101, DailyAction-DVS, UCF101-DVS, and HMDB51-DVS demonstrate that under the multi-scale constraints of input time window, RM-SNN can significantly reduce the network average spiking activity rate while improving the task performance. In addition, by visualizing spiking responses, we analyze why sparser spiking activity can be better. Code.