用脉冲神经网络实现水下声呐图像高效目标检测,节能超3倍。
Spiking Neural Networks for Energy-Efficient Object Detection in Forward-Looking Sonar Imagery

- 采用脉冲神经网络与代理梯度训练,实现稀疏计算
- 能耗降低3.3倍,精度接近主流CNN模型
- 对噪声更鲁棒,适合真实水下复杂环境
自主水下航行器(AUV)在科研、能源和国防等领域日益重要,但受限于电池容量,在远程任务中需平衡推进、传感与计算的功耗。在黑暗或浑浊水域,光学感知效果差,声呐成为主要感知方式。当前主流的目标检测方法为卷积神经网络(CNN),但能耗高(如YOLOv8m:322 mJ/推理)。脉冲神经网络(SNN)基于二值脉冲激活,仅执行稀疏累加操作,配合类脑硬件可大幅降低能耗。前向声呐(FLS)图像具有稀疏且高对比度结构,与脉冲编码天然匹配。本文首次评估了SNN在FLS图像目标检测中的适用性。SpikeYOLO是全脉冲网络,采用代理梯度训练,在三个FLS数据集上与主流CNN基线对比。关键结果:SpikeYOLO T=2在UATD数据集上理论计算能耗降至97 mJ(YOLOv8m为322 mJ),降幅达3.3倍,同时保持竞争力([email protected]:0.95为0.529,优于YOLOv8m的0.575);在稀疏的Marine-Debris-FLS数据集上,精度与YOLOv8m相当,能耗降低4.4倍;对乘性斑点噪声更具鲁棒性(σ=0.4时仅3.0%性能下降,而YOLOv8m为8.9%),在σ=0.6时表现全面超越,直接关联实际部署需求。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly important tools in industries ranging from research, to energy, to defense. AUVs are power-constrained platforms operating in remote environments with fixed battery capacities, where propulsion competes with compute and sensors for power over lengthy mission durations. AUVs frequently operate in dark or turbid waters where optical sensing is of limited value, and rely on sonar as their primary sensing modality. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the state-of-the-art solution for object detection in forward-looking sonar imagery, but are energy expensive (e.g. YOLOv8m: 322 mJ/inference). Spiking neural networks (SNNs) rely on binary spike activations and thus sparse accumulate-only operations, allowing them to be remarkably energy efficient, particularly when paired with dedicated neuromorphic hardware. The sparse, high-contrast structure of forward-looking sonar (FLS) returns is structurally matched to spike coding in a way that optical imagery is not. No prior work has assessed the suitability of SNNs for object detection in FLS imagery. SpikeYOLO, a fully spiking network trained with surrogate gradients, was benchmarked against state-of-the-art CNN baselines on three FLS object detection datasets. Key results: SpikeYOLO T=2 achieves 3.3$\times$ lower theoretical compute energy on UATD (97 vs 322 mJ) at competitive accuracy (0.529 [email protected]:0.95 vs. YOLOv8m's 0.575); SpikeYOLO matches YOLOv8m on [email protected] and outperforms YOLO-SONAR and Fast R-CNN baselines on the sparse Marine-Debris-FLS dataset at 4.4$\times$ lower energy; SpikeYOLO demonstrates superior robustness to multiplicative speckle noise (3.0% degradation at $σ{=}0.4$ vs. 8.9% for YOLOv8m), outperforming YOLOv8m outright at $σ{=}0.6$, directly relevant to real-world FLS deployment.
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