Optical neural network

An optical neural network is an implementation of a neural network model with optical components. One possibility is the Hopfield neural network

There is one recent (2007) model of Optical Neural Network: the Programmable Optical Array/Analogic Computer (POAC). It had been implemented in year 2000 and reported based on modified Joint Fourier Transform Correlator (JTC) and Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) as a holographic optical memory. Full parallelism, large array size and the speed of light are three promises offered by POAC to implement an optical CNN. They had been investigated during the last years with their practical limitations and considerations yielding the design of the first portable POAC version.

The practical details: hardware (optical setups) and software (optical templates) are published. However, POAC is a general purpose and programmable array computer that have a wide range of applications including: image processing; pattern recognition; target tracking; real-time video processing; document security; and optical switching.