Research on target detection for autonomous driving based on ECS-spiking neural networks

In response to the increasing demands for improved model performance and reduced energy consumption in object detection tasks relevant to autonomous driving, this research presents an advanced YOLO model, designated as ECSLIF-YOLO, which is based on the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire with Extracellular Space (ECS-LIF) framework. The primary aim of this model is to tackle the issues associated with the high energy consumption of traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the suboptimal performance of existing spiking neural networks (SNNs). Empirical findings demonstrate that ECSLIF-YOLO achieves a peak mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.917 on the BDD100K and KITTI datasets, thereby aligning with the accuracy levels of conventional ANNs while exceeding the performance of current direct-training SNN approaches without incurring additional energy costs. These findings suggest that ECSLIF-YOLO is particularly well-suited to assist the development of efficient and reliable systems for autonomous driving.