Brain-Inspired Spiking Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Object Detection

Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have the capability of energy-efficient processing of temporal information. However, leveraging the rich dynamic characteristics of SNNs and prior works in artificial neural networks (ANNs) to construct an effective object detection model for visual tasks remains an open question for further exploration. To develop a directly-trained , low energy consumption and high-performance multi-scale SNN model, we propose a novel interpretable object detection framework Multi-scale Spiking Detector (MSD). Initially, we propose a spiking convolutional neuron as a core component of the Optic Nerve Nucleus Block (ONNB), designed to significantly enhance the deep feature extraction capabilities of SNNs. ONNB enables direct training with improved energy efficiency, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art ANN-to-SNN conversion and SNN techniques. In addition, we propose a Multi-scale Spiking Detection Framework to emulate the biological response and comprehension of stimuli from different objects. Wherein, spiking multi-scale fusion and the spiking detector are employed to integrate features across different depths and to detect response outcomes, respectively. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art ANN detectors, with only 7.8 M parameters and 6.43 mJ energy consumption. MSD obtains the mean average precision (mAP) of 62.0% and 66.3% on COCO and Gen1 datasets, respectively.