Spiking Hierarchical Neural Network for Corner Detection

To enable fast reliable feature matching or tracking in scenes, features need to be discrete and meaningful, and hence corner detection is often used for this purpose. We present a new approach to corner detection inspired by the structure and behaviour of the human visual system, which uses spiking neural networks. Standard digital images are processed and converted to spikes in a manner similar to the processing that is performed in the retina. The spiking neural network performs edge and corner detection using receptive fields that are able to detect edges and corners of various orientations. The locations where neurons emit a spike indicate the positions of detected features. Results are presented using synthetic and real images.