Recognizing High-Speed Moving Objects with Spike Camera

Spike camera is a novel bio-inspired vision sensor that mimics the sampling mechanism of the primate fovea. It presents high temporal resolution and dynamic range, showing great potentials in the high-speed moving object recognition task, which has not been fully explored in the Multimedia community due to the lack of data and annotations. This paper contributes the first large-scale High-Speed Spiking Recognition (HSSR) dataset, by recording high-speed moving objects using a spike camera. The HSSR dataset contains 135,000 indoor objects annotated using ImageNet labels and 3,100 outdoor objects collected from real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we propose an original spiking recognition framework, which employs long-term spike stream features to supervise the feature learning from short-term spike streams. This framework improves the recognition accuracy, meanwhile substantially decreasing the recognition latency, making our method can accurately recognize moving objects at an equivalent speed of 514 km/h, using only 1 ms of spike stream. Experimental results show that, the proposed method achieves 76.5% accuracy for recognizing 100 fine-grained indoor objects and 84.3% accuracy for recognizing 8 outdoor objects using 1 ms of spike streams. Resources will be available at https://github.com/Evin-X/HSSR.