Optical broadcast neural network architecture for vision applications

In this paper we describe the implementation of a vision system based on an optoelectronic neural network architecture which is based on an optical broadcast interconnection scheme. The architecture of the neural network processor has been designed to exploit the computational characteristics of electronics and the communication characteristics of optics, thus it is based on an optical broadcast of input signals to a dense array of processing elements. In the proposed vision system, a CMOS sensor capture the image of an object, the output of the camera is introduced to the optoelectronic processor which compares the input image with a set of reference patterns, the optoelectronic processor provides the reference pattern that best match with the input image. The processing core of the system is an optoelectronic architecture that has been configured as a Hamming neural network.