An Extended Self-Organizing Map with Gated Neurons

Kohonen's self-organizing map is extended by a technique allowing the neurons in the feature map to compete in a selective manner. This is accomplished by introducing gated neurons prior to the winner-take-all layer. These gated neurons are activated by a cosine function with time-varying frequency. This results in a spatio-temporal signature at the output for each input pattern over a predetermined interval. This pattern is found to be unique in its characteristics and leads to very high degree of recognition results. The simulations performed on a standard texture recognition problem indicate excellent performance