Multi-layered Spiking Neural Network with Target Timestamp Threshold Adaptation and STDP

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are good candidates to produce ultra-energy-efficient hardware. However, the performance of these models is currently behind traditional methods. Introducing multi-layered SNNs is a promising way to reduce this gap. We propose in this paper a new threshold adaptation system which uses a timestamp objective at which neurons should fire. We show that our method leads to state-of-the-art classification rates on the MNIST dataset (98.60%) and the Faces/Motorbikes dataset (99.46%) with an unsupervised SNN followed by a linear SVM. We also investigate the sparsity level of the network by testing different inhibition policies and STDP rules

Unsupervised Visual Feature Learning with Spike-timing-dependent Plasticity: How Far are we from Traditional Feature Learning Approaches?

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) equipped with latency coding and spike-timing dependent plasticity rules offer an alternative to solve the data and energy bottlenecks of standard computer vision approaches: they can learn visual features without supervision and can be implemented by ultra-low power hardware architectures. However, their performance in image classification has never been evaluated on recent image datasets. In this paper, we compare SNNs to auto-encoders on three visual recognition datasets, and extend the use of SNNs to color images. The analysis of the results helps us identify some bottlenecks of SNNs: the limits of on-center/off-center coding, especially for color images, and the ineffectiveness of current inhibition mechanisms. These issues should be addressed to build effective SNNs for image recognition

THE MORPHOBATHYMETRIC FEATURES OF THE CUCIULAT LAKES (SĂLAJ COUNTY) AND THEIR WATERS’ PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The lake units analyzed in this study are located in the Purcăreţ-Boiu Mare plateau, specifically in the formerly Cuciulat quarry (Salaj County). To the origin of the two lake basins, have contributed mostly anthropogenic factors and to a smaller extent natural ones. The lakes formed next to the quarry are significantly influenced by the spoil bank: this can be seen in the lakes’ form, in their bathymetry and also in some of their physical characteristics. The identification of the lakes’ morphobathymetric features and of the waters’ physical characteristics relied on measurements taken in the summer of 2009 (August 17). In the field, we used a Hannah HI 9828 multiparameter instrument to measure the waters’ physical characteristics and a GPS to pinpoint the measurements’ position. Also for the depth measurements, because they are shallow lakes, besides the GPS, we used a Seechi disk. To capture the best possible spatial variation of the mentioned characteristics, we used interpolation as modeling method

S3TC: Spiking Separated Spatial and Temporal Convolutions with Unsupervised STDP-based Learning for Action Recognition

Video analysis is a major computer vision task that has received a lot of attention in recent years. The current state-of-the-art performance for video analysis is achieved with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have high computational costs and need large amounts of labeled data for training. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have significantly lower computational costs (thousands of times) than regular non-spiking networks when implemented on neuromorphic hardware. They have been used for video analysis with methods like 3D Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks (3D CSNNs). However, these networks have a significantly larger number of parameters compared with spiking 2D CSNN. This, not only increases the computational costs, but also makes these networks more difficult to implement with neuromorphic hardware. In this work, we use CSNNs trained in an unsupervised manner with the Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) rule, and we introduce, for the first time, Spiking Separated Spatial and Temporal Convolutions (S3TCs) for the sake of reducing the number of parameters required for video analysis. This unsupervised learning has the advantage of not needing large amounts of labeled data for training. Factorizing a single spatio-temporal spiking convolution into a spatial and a temporal spiking convolution decreases the number of parameters of the network. We test our network with the KTH, Weizmann, and IXMAS datasets, and we show that S3TCs successfully extract spatio-temporal information from videos, while increasing the output spiking activity, and outperforming spiking 3D convolutions

Drowsy Driver Detection System Using Eye Blink Patterns

International audienceThis paper presents an automatic drowsy driver monitoring and accident prevention system that is based on monitoring the changes in the eye blink duration. Our proposed method detects visual changes in eye locations using the proposed horizontal symmetry feature of the eyes. Our new method detects eye blinks via a standard webcam in real-time at 110fps for a 320×240 resolution. Experimental results in the JZU [3] eye-blink database showed that the proposed system detects eye blinks with a 94% accuracy with a 1% false positive rate

Automatic Facial Feature Detection for Facial Expression Recognition

International audienceThis paper presents a real-time automatic facial feature point detection method for facial expression recognition. The system is capable of detecting seven facial feature points (eyebrows, pupils, nose, and corners of mouth) in grayscale images extracted from a given video. Extracted feature points then used for facial expression recognition. Neutral, happiness and surprise emotions have been studied on the Bosphorus dataset and tested on FG-NET video dataset using OpenCV. We compared our results with previous studies on this dataset. Our experiments showed that proposed method has the advantage of locating facial feature points automatically and accurately in real-time

Positive/Negative Emotion Detection from RGB-D upper Body Images

International audienceThe ability to identify users'mental states represents a valu-able asset for improving human-computer interaction. Considering that spontaneous emotions are conveyed mostly through facial expressions and the upper Body movements, we propose to use these modalities together for the purpose of negative/positive emotion classification. A method that allows the recognition of mental states from videos is pro-posed. Based on a dataset composed with RGB-D movies a set of indic-tors of positive and negative is extracted from 2D (RGB) information. In addition, a geometric framework to model the depth flows and capture human body dynamics from depth data is proposed. Due to temporal changes in pixel and depth intensity which characterize spontaneous emo-tions dataset, the depth features are used to define the relation between changes in upper body movements and the affect. We describe a space of depth and texture information to detect the mood of people using upper body postures and their evolution across time. The experimentation has been performed on Cam3D dataset and has showed promising results

IPTV 2.0 from Triple Play to social TV

International audienceThe great success of social technologies is transforming the Internet into a collaborative community. With a vision of IPTV 2.0, this paper presents our research work towards the exploitation of social phenomena in the domain of TV. Based on the advantage of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service architecture, the current IPTV service is extended from two aspects: TV-enriched communication and sociability-enhanced TV. Two applications namely TV Buddy and Social Electronic Program Guide (EPG) are proposed to demonstrate them respectively. Finally, we developed a prototype system on Ericsson IMS Software Development Studio (SDS)

MuMIE : Une approche automatique pour l'interopérabilité des métadonnées

National audienceAvec l'explosion du multimedia, l'utilisation des métadonnées est de-venue cruciale afin d'assurer une bonne gestion des contenus. Cependant, il est nécessaire d'y assurer un accès uniforme aux métadonnées. Plusieurs techniques ont ainsi été développées afin de réaliser l'interopérabilité. La plupart d'entre elles sont spécifiques à un seul langage de description. Les systèmes de matching existants présentent certaines limitations, notamment dans le traitement des informations structurelles. Nous présentons dans cet article un nouveau sys-tème d'intégration qui supporte des schémas provenant de langages descriptifs différents. De plus, la méthode de matching proposée a recours à plusieurs types d'information de façon à augmenter la précision de l'intégration