Experimental studies on learning capabilities of optical associative memory

Abstract
The learning capabilities of optical associative memory called the optical associatron are experimentally shown. The experimental system has a simple architecture for optical associative memory; in particular, the system has versatile adaptive learning capabilities implemented with microchannel spatial light modulators. In this paper, various experimental results of learning and recalling processes on the system are shown. Based on the results, the behavior of learning on the optical associative memory is discussed. In addition, a modified method of learning is proposed and verified on the system. A method for implementation of error backpropagation is also proposed.