A generic pretreatment for spiking neuron application on lipreading with STANN (Spatio-Temporal Artificial Neural Networks)

Spiking neurons treat sequences of impulses. However the signals to which we have access in the majority of the applications evolve generally continuously with time and are not of impulse nature. If one wants to use spiking neurons, a pretreatment should then be found adapted to the application to convert the raw signals into sequences of impulses. We propose here a simple generic pretreatment which carries out this conversion. We illustrate then this proposal within the framework of the lipreading by STANN (Spatio-Temporal Artificial Neural Networks) and show that this pretreatment is simpler and more effective than that which had been used in [1] for this same application.