ViStream: Improving Computation Efficiency of Visual Streaming Perception via Law-of-Charge-Conservation Inspired Spiking Neural Network

Visual streaming perception (VSP) involves online intelligent processing of sequential frames captured by vision sensors, enabling real-time decision-making in applications such as autonomous driving, UAVs, and AR/VR. However, the computational efficiency of VSP on edge devices remains a challenge due to power constraints and the under-utilization of temporal dependencies between frames. While spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer biologically inspired event-driven processing with potential energy benefits, their practical advantage over artificial neural networks (ANNs) for VSP tasks remains unproven. In this work, we introduce a novel framework, ViStream, which leverages the Law of Charge Conservation (LoCC) property in ST-BIF neurons and a differential encoding (DiffEncode) scheme to optimize SNN inference for VSP. By encoding temporal differences between neighboring frames and eliminating frequent membrane resets, ViStream achieves significant computational reduction while maintaining accuracy equivalent to its ANN counterpart. We provide theoretical proofs of equivalence and validate ViStream across diverse VSP tasks, including object detection, tracking, and segmentation, demonstrating substantial energy savings without compromising performance. ViStream is publicly available at: https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Research-Group/ViStream