Turn Down That Noise: Synaptic Encoding of Afferent SNR in a Single Spiking Neuron

We have added a simplified neuromorphic model of Spike Time Dependent Plasticity (STDP) to the previously described Synapto-dendritic Kernel Adapting Neuron (SKAN), a hardware efficient neuron model capable of learning spatio-temporal spike patterns. The resulting neuron model is the first to perform synaptic encoding of afferent signal-to-noise ratio in addition to the unsupervised learning of spatio-temporal spike patterns. The neuron model is particularly suitable for implementation in digital neuromorphic hardware as it does not use any complex mathematical operations and uses a novel shift-based normalization approach to achieve synaptic homeostasis. The neuron´s noise compensation properties are characterized and tested on random spatio-temporal spike patterns as well as a noise corrupted subset of the zero images of the MNIST handwritten digit dataset. Results show the simultaneously learning common patterns in its input data while dynamically weighing individual afferents based on their signal to noise ratio. Despite its simplicity the interesting behaviors of the neuron model and the resulting computational power may also offer insights into biological systems.