Pulse-coupled neural networks for contour and motion matchings

Two neural networks based on temporal coding are proposed in this paper to perform contour and motion matchings. Both of the proposed networks are three-dimensional (3-D) pulse-coupled neural networks (PCNNs). They are composed of simplified Eckhorn neurons and mimic the structure of the primary visual cortex. The PCNN for contour matching can segment from the background the object with a particular contour, which has been stored as prior knowledge and controls the network activity in the form of spike series; The PCNN for motion matching not only detects the motion in the visual field, but also extracts the object moving in an arbitrarily specified direction. The basic idea of these two models is to encode information into the timing of spikes and later to decode this information through coincidence detectors and synapse delays to realize the knowledge-controlled object matchings. The simulation results demonstrate that the temporal coding and the decoding mechanisms are powerful enough to perform the contour and motion matchings.