STEMNIST: Spiking Tactile Extended MNIST Neuromorphic Dataset

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tripathi, Anubhab, Gaishan, Li, Fu, Zhengnan, Bartolozzi, Chiara, Shi, Bert E., Basu, Arindam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912801775157248
author Tripathi, Anubhab
Gaishan, Li
Fu, Zhengnan
Bartolozzi, Chiara
Shi, Bert E.
Basu, Arindam
author_facet Tripathi, Anubhab
Gaishan, Li
Fu, Zhengnan
Bartolozzi, Chiara
Shi, Bert E.
Basu, Arindam
contents Tactile sensing is essential for robotic manipulation, prosthetics and assistive technologies, yet neuromorphic tactile datasets remain limited compared to their visual counterparts. We introduce STEMNIST, a large-scale neuromorphic tactile dataset extending ST-MNIST from 10 digits to 35 alphanumeric classes (uppercase letters A--Z and digits 1--9), providing a challenging benchmark for event-based haptic recognition. The dataset comprises 7,700 samples collected from 34 participants using a custom \(16\times 16\) tactile sensor array operating at 120 Hz, encoded as 1,005,592 spike events through adaptive temporal differentiation. Following EMNIST's visual character recognition protocol, STEMNIST addresses the critical gap between simplified digit classification and real-world tactile interaction scenarios requiring alphanumeric discrimination. Baseline experiments using conventional CNNs (90.91% test accuracy) and spiking neural networks (89.16%) establish performance benchmarks. The dataset's event-based format, unrestricted spatial variability and rich temporal structure makes it suitable for testing neuromorphic hardware and bio-inspired learning algorithms. STEMNIST enables reproducible evaluation of tactile recognition systems and provides a foundation for advancing energy-efficient neuromorphic perception in robotics, biomedical engineering and human-machine interfaces. The dataset, documentation and codes are publicly available to accelerate research in neuromorphic tactile computing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01658
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STEMNIST: Spiking Tactile Extended MNIST Neuromorphic Dataset
Tripathi, Anubhab
Gaishan, Li
Fu, Zhengnan
Bartolozzi, Chiara
Shi, Bert E.
Basu, Arindam
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Tactile sensing is essential for robotic manipulation, prosthetics and assistive technologies, yet neuromorphic tactile datasets remain limited compared to their visual counterparts. We introduce STEMNIST, a large-scale neuromorphic tactile dataset extending ST-MNIST from 10 digits to 35 alphanumeric classes (uppercase letters A--Z and digits 1--9), providing a challenging benchmark for event-based haptic recognition. The dataset comprises 7,700 samples collected from 34 participants using a custom \(16\times 16\) tactile sensor array operating at 120 Hz, encoded as 1,005,592 spike events through adaptive temporal differentiation. Following EMNIST's visual character recognition protocol, STEMNIST addresses the critical gap between simplified digit classification and real-world tactile interaction scenarios requiring alphanumeric discrimination. Baseline experiments using conventional CNNs (90.91% test accuracy) and spiking neural networks (89.16%) establish performance benchmarks. The dataset's event-based format, unrestricted spatial variability and rich temporal structure makes it suitable for testing neuromorphic hardware and bio-inspired learning algorithms. STEMNIST enables reproducible evaluation of tactile recognition systems and provides a foundation for advancing energy-efficient neuromorphic perception in robotics, biomedical engineering and human-machine interfaces. The dataset, documentation and codes are publicly available to accelerate research in neuromorphic tactile computing.
title STEMNIST: Spiking Tactile Extended MNIST Neuromorphic Dataset
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01658