Modeling activity-dependent plasticity in BCM spiking neural networks with application to human behavior recognition

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are considered to be computationally more powerful than conventional NNs. However, the capability of SNNs in solving complex real-world problems remains to be demonstrated. In this paper, we propose a substantial extension of the Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) SNN model, in which the plasticity parameters are regulated by a gene regulatory network (GRN). Meanwhile, the dynamics of the GRN is dependent on the activation levels of the BCM neurons. We term the whole model "GRN-BCM." To demonstrate its computational power, we first compare the GRN-BCM with a standard BCM, a hidden Markov model, and a reservoir computing model on a complex time series classification problem. Simulation results indicate that the GRN-BCM significantly outperforms the compared models. The GRN-BCM is then applied to two widely used datasets for human behavior recognition. Comparative results on the two datasets suggest that the GRN-BCM is very promising for human behavior recognition, although the current experiments are still limited to the scenarios in which only one object is moving in the considered video sequences.