Evaluating SPAN Incremental Learning for Handwritten Digit Recognition

In a previous work [12, 11], the authors proposed SPAN: a learning algorithm based on temporal coding for Spiking Neural Network (SNN). The algorithm trains a neuron to associate target spike patterns to input spatio-temporal spike patterns. In this paper we present the details of experiment to evaluate the feasibility of SPAN learning on a real-world dataset: classifying images of handwritten digits. As spike encoding is an important issue in using SNN for practical applications, we discuss few methods for image conversion to spike patterns. The experiment yields encouraging results to consider the SPAN learning for practical temporal pattern recognition applications.