Spiking CapsNet: A spiking neural network with a biologically plausible routing rule between capsules

Spiking neural network (SNN) has attracted much attention due to its powerful spatio-temporal information representation ability. Capsule Neural Network (CapsNet) does well in assembling and coupling features of different network layers. Here, we propose Spiking CapsNet by combining spiking neurons and capsule structures. In addition, we propose a more biologically plausible Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity routing mechanism. The coupling ability is further improved by fully considering the spatio-temporal relationship between spiking capsules of the low layer and the high layer. We have verified experiments on the MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR10 datasets. Our algorithm still shows comparable performance concerning other excellent SNNs with typical structures (convolutional, fully-connected) on these classification tasks. Our Spiking CapsNet combines SNN and CapsNet’s strengths and shows strong robustness to noise and affine transformation. By adding different Salt-Pepper and Gaussian noise to the test dataset, the experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is more resistant to noise than other approaches. As well, our Spiking CapsNet shows strong generalization to affine transformation on the AffNIST dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/BrainCog-X/Brain-Cog.