S3Det: a fast object detector for remote sensing images based on artificial to spiking neural network conversion

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have made great strides in the field of remote sensing image object detection. However, low detection efficiency and high power consumption have always been significant bottlenecks in remote sensing. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) process information in the form of sparse spikes, creating the advantage of high energy efficiency for computer vision tasks. However, most studies have focused on simple classification tasks, and only a few researchers have applied SNNs to object detection in natural images. In this study, we consider the parsimonious nature of biological brains and propose a fast ANN-to-SNN conversion method for remote sensing image detection. We establish a fast sparse model for pulse sequence perception based on group sparse features and conduct transform-domain sparse resampling of the original images to enable fast perception of image features and encoded pulse sequences. In addition, to meet accuracy requirements in relevant remote sensing scenarios, we theoretically analyze the transformation error and propose channel self-decaying weighted normalization (CSWN) to eliminate neuron overactivation. We propose S3Det, a remote sensing image object detection model. Our experiments, based on a large publicly available remote sensing dataset, show that S3Det achieves an accuracy performance similar to that of the ANN. Meanwhile, our transformed network is only 24.32% as sparse as the benchmark and consumes only 1.46 W, which is 1/122 of the original algorithm’s power consumption.