ClassONN: Classification with Oscillatory Neural Networks using the Kuramoto Model

Over the recent years, networks of coupled oscillators or oscillatory neural networks (ONNs) emerged as an alternative computing paradigm with information encoded in phase. Such networks are intrinsically attractive for associative memory applications such as pattern retrieval. Thus far, there are few works focusing on image classification using ONNs, as there is no straightforward way to do it. This paper investigates the performance of a neuromorphic phase-based classification model using a fully connected single layer ONNs. For benchmarking, we deploy the ONN on the full set of 28×28 binary MNIST handwritten digits and achieve around 70% accuracy on both training and test set. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort classifying such large images utilizing ONNs.