Temporal pulses driven spiking neural network for time and power efficient object recognition in autonomous driving

Accurate real-time object recognition from sensory data has long been a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving. Even though deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in this area, their considerable processing latency, power consumption, as well as computational complexity have been challenging issues for real-time autonomous driving applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to address the real-time object recognition problem utilizing spiking neural networks (SNNs). The proposed SNN model works directly with raw LiDAR temporal pulses without the pulse-to-point cloud preprocessing procedure, which can significantly reduce delay and power consumption. Being evaluated on various datasets derived from LiDAR and dynamic vision sensor (DVS), including Sim LiDAR, KITTI, and DVS-barrel, our proposed model has shown remarkable time and power efficiency, while achieving comparable recognition performance as the state-of-the-art methods. This paper highlights the SNN's great potentials in autonomous driving and related applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use SNN to perform time and energy efficient object recognition directly on LiDAR temporal pulses in the setting of autonomous driving.