  In the field of artificial intelligence, neuromorphic computing has been
around for several decades. Deep learning has however made much recent progress
such that it consistently outperforms neuromorphic learning algorithms in
classification tasks in terms of accuracy. Specifically in the field of image
classification, neuromorphic computing has been traditionally using either the
temporal or rate code for encoding static images in datasets into spike trains.
It is only till recently, that neuromorphic vision sensors are widely used by
the neuromorphic research community, and provides an alternative to such
encoding methods. Since then, several neuromorphic datasets as obtained by
applying such sensors on image datasets (e.g. the neuromorphic CALTECH 101)
have been introduced. These data are encoded in spike trains and hence seem
ideal for benchmarking of neuromorphic learning algorithms. Specifically, we
train a deep learning framework used for image classification on the CALTECH
101 and a collapsed version of the neuromorphic CALTECH 101 datasets. We
obtained an accuracy of 91.66% and 78.01% for the CALTECH 101 and neuromorphic
CALTECH 101 datasets respectively. For CALTECH 101, our accuracy is close to
the best reported accuracy, while for neuromorphic CALTECH 101, it outperforms
the last best reported accuracy by over 10%. This raises the question of the
suitability of such datasets as benchmarks for neuromorphic learning
algorithms.
