Recently spiking neural networks (SNNs), the third-generation of neural networks has shown remarkable capabilities of energy-efficient computing, which is a promising alternative for deep neural networks (DNNs) with high energy consumption. SNNs have reached competitive results compared to DNNs in relatively simple tasks and small datasets such as image classification and MNIST/CIFAR, while few studies on more challenging vision tasks on complex datasets. In this paper, we focus on extending deep SNNs to object tracking, a more advanced vision task with embedded applications and energy-saving requirements, and present a spike-based Siamese network called SiamSNN. Specifically, we propose an optimized hybrid similarity estimation method to exploit temporal information in the SNNs, and introduce a novel two-status coding scheme to optimize the temporal distribution of output spike trains for further improvements. SiamSNN is the first deep SNN tracker that achieves short latency and low precision loss on the visual object tracking benchmarks OTB2013/2015, VOT2016/2018, and GOT-10k. Moreover, SiamSNN achieves notably low energy consumption and real-time on Neuromorphic chip TrueNorth.
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