FPGA-based fast bin-ratio spiking ensemble network for radioisotope identification

Abstract

In this work, we demonstrate the training, conversion, and implementation flow of an FPGA-based bin-ratio ensemble spiking neural network applied for radioisotope identification. The combination of techniques including learned step quantisation (LSQ) and pruning facilitated the implementation by compressing the network's parameters down to 30% yet retaining the accuracy of 97.04% with an accuracy loss of less than 1%. Meanwhile, the proposed ensemble network of 20 3-layer spiking neural networks (SNNs), which incorporates 1160 spiking neurons, only needs 334 μs for a single inference with the given clock frequency of 100 MHz. Under such optimisation, this FPGA implementation in an Artix-7 board consumes 157 μJ per inference by estimation.

Keywords: Bin-ratio ensemble networks; Field programmable gate array (FPGA); Radioisotope identification; Spiking neural networks (SNN).