ALL-OPTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF A SELF-ORGANIZING MAP - A PRELIMINARY APPROACH

Optically addressed ferroelectric liquid-crystal devices present certa in characteristics that make them attractive for all-optical implement ations of neural architectures. This is particularly true for the impl ementation of analog self-organizing systems such as Kohonen's self-or ganizing map. The optical architecture proposed here is based on the p rinciple of a resonator memory. The main novelty lies in the two-dimen sional, continuous, binary information encoding and organization. Basi c operations such as neural decision, weight updating, and information spatial ordering are investigated. The principle of a learning proced ure close to the Hebbian rule is discussed.