Sa-SNN: spiking attention neural network for image classification

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are known as third generation neural networks due to their energy efficient and low power consumption. SNNs have received a lot of attention due to their biological plausibility. SNNs are closer to the way biological neural systems work by simulating the transmission of information through discrete spiking signals between neurons. Influenced by the great potential shown by the attention mechanism in convolutional neural networks, Therefore, we propose a Spiking Attention Neural Network (Sa-SNN). The network includes a novel Spiking-Efficient Channel Attention (SECA) module that adopts a local cross-channel interaction strategy without dimensionality reduction, which can be achieved by one-dimensional convolution. It is implemented by convolution, which involves a small number of model parameters but provides a significant performance improvement for the network. The design of local inter-channel interactions through adaptive convolutional kernel sizes, rather than global dependencies, allows the network to focus more on the selection of important features, reduces the impact of redundant features, and improves the network’s recognition and generalisation capabilities. To investigate the effect of this structure on the network, we conducted a series of experiments. Experimental results show that Sa-SNN can perform image classification tasks more accurately. Our network achieved 99.61%, 99.61%, 94.13%, and 99.63% on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, N-MNIST datasets, respectively, and Sa-SNN performed well in terms of accuracy compared with mainstream SNNs.