SIFT-SNN for Traffic-Flow Infrastructure Safety: A Real-Time Context-Aware Anomaly Detection Framework

Automated anomaly detection in transportation infrastructures is essential for enhancing safety and reducing the operational costs associated with manual inspection protocols. This study presents an improved neuromorphic vision system, which extends the prior SIFT-SNN (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform–Spiking Neural Network) proof-of-concept by incorporating temporal feature aggregation for context-aware and sequence-stable detection. Analysis of classical stitching-based pipelines exposed sensitivity to motion and lighting variations, motivating the proposed temporally smoothed neuromorphic design. SIFT keypoints are encoded into latency-based spike trains and classified using a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neural network implemented in PyTorch. Evaluated across three hardware configurations: an NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU, an Intel i7 CPU, and a simulated Jetson Nano; the system achieves 92.3% accuracy and a macro F1-score of 91.0% under five-fold cross-validation. Inference latencies were measured at 9.5 ms, 26.1 ms, and ~48.3 ms per frame, respectively. Memory footprints were under 290 MB and power consumption estimated to be between 5 and 65 W. The classifier distinguishes between safe, partially dislodged, and fully dislodged barrier pins, which are critical failure modes for the Auckland Harbour Bridge’s Movable Concrete Barrier (MCB) system. Temporal smoothing further improves recall for ambiguous cases. Achieving a compact model size (2.9 MB), low-latency inference, and minimal power demands, the proposed framework offers a deployable, interpretable, and energy-efficient alternative to conventional CNN-based inspection tools. Future work will be focused on exploring generalisability and transferability of the work presented, additional input sources, as well as human computer interaction paradigms for various deployment infrastructures and advancement.