An SNN-Based Bionic Olfactory Signal Processing Network for Odor Recognition

Feature extraction in electronic nose (E-nose) signals is the first signal processing step in machine olfactory systems. Traditional feature extraction methods are often cumbersome and depend greatly on the experience of the researcher. The failure of feature extraction seriously deteriorates the performance of subsequent pattern recognition algorithms. In addition, inherent sensor signal shifts among sensing systems with identical configurations affect E-nose performance. Therefore, due to the unfavorable performance of empirical feature extraction and poor reproducibility, the odor detection ability of E-nose systems has deteriorated. In this article, a bionic olfactory signal processing (BOSP) network based on a spiking neural network (SNN) is proposed to address these issues. Inspired by the structure of the olfactory bulb in mammals, the system has two components: a virtual olfactory receptor (VOR) layer and a bionic olfactory bulb (BOB) layer. The VORs convert the sensor response signals into spike sequences through two spike coding strategies. The BOBs, consisting of mitral cells and granule cells, extract spatiotemporal features from the spike sequences. The proposed BOSP network is a feature-level model that automatically extracts useful features from the sensor array outputs without applying traditional and tedious feature extraction steps, which can subsequently cascade various classifiers. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that the BOSP network not only shows better feature extraction capability than several state-of-the-art methods but also exhibits promising shift suppression ability.