Deep Convolutional Spiking Neural Networks for Image Classification

Spiking neural networks are biologically plausible counterparts of the artificial neural networks, artificial neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent and spiking neural networks are trained with spike timing dependant plasticity. Training deep convolutional neural networks is a memory and power intensive job. Spiking networks could potentially help in reducing the power usage. There is a large pool of tools for one to chose to train artificial neural networks of any size, on the other hand all the available tools to simulate spiking neural networks are geared towards computational neuroscience applications and they are not suitable for real life applications. In this work we focus on implementing a spiking CNN using Tensorflow to examine behaviour of the network and empirically study the effect of various parameters on learning capabilities and also study catastrophic forgetting in the spiking CNN and weight initialization problem in R-STDP using MNIST and N-MNIST data sets.