A new paradigm for real-time parallel storage and recognition of patterns based on a hierarchical organization of associative memories utilizing Walsh function encoding

摘要

A new hierarchical Walsh memory which can store and quickly recognize any number of patterns is proposed. A Walsh function based associative memory was found to be capable of storing and recognizing patterns in parallel via purely a software algorithmic technique (namely, without resorting to parallel hardware) while the memory itself only takes a single pattern space of computer memory, due to the Walsh encoding of each pattern. This type of distributed associative memory lends itself to high speed pattern recognition and has been reported earlier in a single memory version. In this paper, the single memory concept has first been extended to a parallel memory module and then to a tree-shaped hierarchy of these parallel modules that are capable of storing and recognizing any number of patterns for practical large scale data applications exemplified by image and speech recognition.