Brainchip Research Institute, Perth 6000, Australia.
School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup 6027, Australia.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jan 7;22(2):440. doi: 10.3390/s22020440.
Current developments in artificial olfactory systems, also known as electronic nose (e-nose) systems, have benefited from advanced machine learning techniques that have significantly improved the conditioning and processing of multivariate feature-rich sensor data. These advancements are complemented by the application of bioinspired algorithms and architectures based on findings from neurophysiological studies focusing on the biological olfactory pathway. The application of spiking neural networks (SNNs), and concepts from neuromorphic engineering in general, are one of the key factors that has led to the design and development of efficient bioinspired e-nose systems. However, only a limited number of studies have focused on deploying these models on a natively event-driven hardware platform that exploits the benefits of neuromorphic implementation, such as ultra-low-power consumption and real-time processing, for simplified integration in a portable e-nose system. In this paper, we extend our previously reported neuromorphic encoding and classification approach to a real-world dataset that consists of sensor responses from a commercial e-nose system when exposed to eight different types of malts. We show that the proposed SNN-based classifier was able to deliver 97% accurate classification results at a maximum latency of 0.4 ms per inference with a power consumption of less than 1 mW when deployed on neuromorphic hardware. One of the key advantages of the proposed neuromorphic architecture is that the entire functionality, including pre-processing, event encoding, and classification, can be mapped on the neuromorphic system-on-a-chip (NSoC) to develop power-efficient and highly-accurate real-time e-nose systems.
当前,人工嗅觉系统(也称为电子鼻(e-nose)系统)的发展得益于先进的机器学习技术,这些技术极大地改善了多元特征丰富传感器数据的调节和处理。这些进展得到了基于神经生理学研究中对生物嗅觉途径的发现的生物启发算法和架构的应用的补充。应用尖峰神经网络(SNN),以及神经形态工程中的一般概念,是导致设计和开发高效的生物启发型电子鼻系统的关键因素之一。然而,只有少数研究专注于在利用神经形态实现的超低功耗和实时处理等优势的本地事件驱动硬件平台上部署这些模型,以简化在便携式电子鼻系统中的集成。在本文中,我们将我们之前报告的神经形态编码和分类方法扩展到一个真实世界的数据集,该数据集由商业电子鼻系统在暴露于八种不同类型麦芽时的传感器响应组成。我们表明,所提出的基于 SNN 的分类器能够在神经形态硬件上部署时以每推理 0.4 毫秒的最大延迟提供 97%的准确分类结果,功耗小于 1mW。所提出的神经形态架构的一个关键优势是,整个功能,包括预处理、事件编码和分类,都可以映射到神经形态系统级芯片(NSoC)上,以开发节能且高度准确的实时电子鼻系统。