NeuroMorse: A Temporally Structured Dataset For Neuromorphic Computing

TL;DR

NeuroMorse introduces a novel temporally structured dataset based on Morse code for benchmarking neuromorphic systems, emphasizing temporal dynamics and hierarchical features to evaluate their ability to process sequence-based information.

Contribution

This work presents NeuroMorse, a new dataset that captures temporal patterns for neuromorphic benchmarking, addressing the lack of temporal dynamic evaluation in existing datasets.

Findings

Linear classifiers struggle with the training set.

Conventional methods find keyword identification challenging.

The dataset captures complex temporal hierarchies.

Abstract

Neuromorphic engineering aims to advance computing by mimicking the brain's efficient processing, where data is encoded as asynchronous temporal events. This eliminates the need for a synchronisation clock and minimises power consumption when no data is present. However, many benchmarks for neuromorphic algorithms primarily focus on spatial features, neglecting the temporal dynamics that are inherent to most sequence-based tasks. This gap may lead to evaluations that fail to fully capture the unique strengths and characteristics of neuromorphic systems. In this paper, we present NeuroMorse, a temporally structured dataset designed for benchmarking neuromorphic learning systems. NeuroMorse converts the top 50 words in the English language into temporal Morse code spike sequences. Despite using only two input spike channels for Morse dots and dashes, complex information is encoded through temporal patterns in the data. The proposed benchmark contains feature hierarchy at multiple temporal scales that test the capacity of neuromorphic algorithms to decompose input patterns into spatial and temporal hierarchies. We demonstrate that our training set is challenging to categorise using a linear classifier and that identifying keywords in the test set is difficult using conventional methods. The NeuroMorse dataset is available at Zenodo, with our accompanying code on GitHub at https://github.com/Ben-E-Walters/NeuroMorse.