The Winner-Take-All Mechanism for All-Optical Systems of Pattern Recognition and Max-Pooling Operation

The winner-take-all (WTA) mechanism based on the inhibitory dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser with an embedded saturable absorber (VCSEL-SA) neurons is proposed for the first time. The WTA mechanism is shown numerically in a photonic spiking neural network (SNN). The effect of bias current on WTA time window is analyzed based on the proposed SNN. Moreover, a pattern recognition approach is presented numerically based on the WTA mechanism in all-optical neural network consisting of VCSEL-SA neurons. For the pattern recognition, the robustness of noisy inputs is examined. The effects of bias current, strength of inhibition and weight matrix on the speed of pattern recognition are analyzed carefully. Furthermore, the max-pooling operation is implemented numerically in the all-optical VCSEL-SA neural network model based on the WTA mechanism for the first time. The results hold great promise for the development of energy-efficient and high-speed photonic spiking neural network.