Using Spatial Pooler of Hierarchical Temporal Memory to classify noisy videos with predefined complexity

This paper examines the performance of a Spatial Pooler (SP) of a Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) in the task of noisy object recognition. To address this challenge, a dedicated custom-designed system based on the SP, histogram calculation module and SVM classifier was implemented. In addition to implementing their own version of HTM, the authors also designed a profiler which is capable of tracing all of the key parameters of the system. This was necessary, since an analysis and monitoring of the system performance turned out to be extremely difficult using conventional testing and debugging tools. The system was initially trained on artificially prepared videos without noise and then tested with a set of noisy video streams. This approach was intended to mimic a real life scenario where an agent or a system trained to deal with ideal objects faces a task of classifying distorted and noisy ones in its regular working conditions. The authors conducted a series of experiments for various macro parameters of HTM SP, as well as for different levels of video reduction ratios. The experiments allowed them to evaluate the performance of two different system setups (i.e. 'Multiple HTMs' and 'Single HTM') under various noise conditions with 32--frame video files. Results of all the tests were compared to SVM baseline setup. It was determined that the system featuring SP is capable of achieving approximately 12 times the noise reduction for a video signal with with distorted bits accounting for 13\% of the total. Furthermore, the system featuring SP performed better also in the experiments without a noise component and achieved a max F1 score of 0.96. The experiments also revealed that a rise of column and synapse number of SP has a substantial impact on the performance of the system. Consequently, the highest F1 score values were obtained for 256 and 4096 synapses and columns respectively.