Integrate and Fire neurons and their application in pattern recognition

In this paper, it is shown how a Leaky Integrate and Fire (LIF) neuron can be applied to solve non-linear pattern recognition problems. Given a set of input patterns belonging to K classes, each input pattern is transformed into an input signal, then the LIF neuron is stimulated during T ms and finally the firing rate is computed. After adjusting the synaptic weights of the neuron model, we expect that input patterns belonging to the same class generate almost the same firing rate and input patterns belonging to different classes generate firing rates different enough to discriminate among the different classes. At last, a comparison between a feed-forward neural network and the LIF neuron is presented when applied to solve non-linear problems.