Spiking neural network (SNN) is interesting due to its strong bio-plausibility and high energy efficiency. However, its performance is falling far behind conventional deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, considering a general class of single-spike temporal-coded integrate-and-fire neurons, we analyze the input-output expressions of both leaky and nonleaky neurons. We show that SNNs built with leaky neurons suffer from the overly-nonlinear and overly-complex input-output response, which is the major reason for their difficult training and low performance. This reason is more fundamental than the commonly believed problem of nondifferentiable spikes. To support this claim, we show that SNNs built with nonleaky neurons can have a less-complex and less-nonlinear input-output response. They can be easily trained and can have superior performance, which is demonstrated by experimenting with the SNNs over two popular network intrusion detection datasets, i.e., the NSL-KDD and the AWID datasets. Our experiment results show that the proposed SNNs outperform a comprehensive list of DNN models and classic machine learning models. This paper demonstrates that SNNs can be promising and competitive in contrast to common beliefs.

Accurate real-time object recognition from sensory data has long been a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving. Even though deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in this area, their considerable processing latency, power consumption as well as computational complexity have been challenging issues for real-time autonomous driving applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to address the real-time object recognition problem utilizing spiking neural networks (SNNs). The proposed SNN model works directly with raw temporal LiDAR pulses without the pulse-to-point cloud preprocessing procedure, which can significantly reduce delay and power consumption. Being evaluated on various datasets derived from LiDAR and dynamic vision sensor (DVS), including Sim LiDAR, KITTI, and DVS-barrel, our proposed model has shown remarkable time and power efficiency, while achieving comparable recognition performance as the state-of-the-art methods. This paper highlights the SNN's great potentials in autonomous driving and related applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use SNN to directly perform time and energy efficient object recognition on temporal LiDAR pulses in the setting of autonomous driving.