Hybrid Neural Network, An Efficient Low-Power Digital Hardware Implementation of Event-based Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Interest in event-based vision sensors has proliferated in recent years, with innovative technology becoming more accessible to new researchers and highlighting such sensors’ potential to enable low-latency sensing at low computational cost. These sensors can outperform frame-based vision sensors regarding data compression, dynamic range, temporal resolution and power efficiency. However, available mature framebased processing methods by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) surpass Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) in terms of accuracy of recognition. In this paper, we introduce a Hybrid Neural Network which is an intermediate solution to exploit advantages of both event-based and frame-based processing.We have implemented this network in FPGA and benchmarked its performance by using different event-based versions of MNIST dataset. HDL codes for this project are available for academic purpose upon request.