R-STDP Based Spiking Neural Network for Human Action Recognition

Video surveillance systems are omnipresent and automatic monitoring of human activities is gaining importance in highly secured environments. The proposed work explores the use of the bio-inspired third generation neural network called spiking neural network (SNN) in order to recognize the action sequences present in a video. The SNN used in this work carries the neural information in terms of timing of spikes rather than the shape of the spikes. The learning technique used herein is reward-modulated spike time-dependent plasticity (R-STDP). It is based on reinforcement learning that modulates or demodulates the synaptic weights depending on the reward or the punishment signal that it receives from the decision layer. The absence of gradient descent techniques and external classifiers makes the system computationally efficient and simple. Finally, the performance of the network is evaluated on the two benchmark datasets, viz., Weizmann and KTH datasets.