PSSD-Transformer: Powerful Sparse Spike-Driven Transformer for Image Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have indeed shown remarkable promise in the field of computer vision, emerging as a low-energy alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, SNNs also face several challenges: i) Existing SNNs are not purely additive and involve a substantial amount of floating-point computations, which contradicts the original design intention of adapting to neuromorphic chips; ii) The incorrect positioning of convolutional and pooling layers relative to spiking layers leads to reduced accuracy; iii) Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons have limited capability in representing local information, which is disadvantageous for downstream visual tasks like semantic segmentation.