A neural network for processing olfactory-like stimuli.

Several critical issues associated with the processing of olfactory stimuli in animals (but focusing on insects) are discussed with a view to designing a neural network which can process olfactory stimuli. This leads to the construction of a neural network that can learn and identify the quality (direction cosines) of an input vector or extract information from a sequence of correlated input vectors, where the latter corresponds to sampling a time varying olfactory stimulus (or other generically similar pattern recognition problems). The network is constructed around a discrete time content-addressable memory (CAM) module which basically satisfies the Hopfield equations with the addition of a unit time delay feedback. This modification improves the convergence properties of the network and is used to control a switch which activates the learning or template formation process when the input is "unknown". The network dynamics are embedded within a sniff cycle which includes a larger time delay (i.e. an integer ts greater than 1) that is also used to control the template formation switch. In addition, this time delay is used to modify the input into the CAM module so that the more dominant of two mingling odors or an odor increasing against a background of odors is more readily identified. The performance of the network is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations and numerical results are presented.