Handwritten Digits Recognition Based on a Parallel Optoelectronic Time-Delay Reservoir Computing System

Abstract

In this work, the performance of an optoelectronic time-delay reservoir computing system for performing a handwritten digit recognition task is numerically investigated, and a scheme to improve the recognition speed using multiple parallel reservoirs is proposed. By comparing four image injection methods based on a single time-delay reservoir, we find that when injecting the histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) features of the digit image, the accuracy rate (AR) is relatively high and is less affected by the offset phase. To improve the recognition speed, we construct a parallel time-delay reservoir system including multi-reservoirs, where each reservoir processes part of the HOG features of one image. Based on 6 parallel reservoirs with each reservoir possessing 100 virtual nodes, the AR can reach about 97.8%, and the reservoir processing speed can reach about 1 × 106 digits per second. Meanwhile, the parallel reservoir system shows strong robustness to the parameter mismatch between multi-reservoirs.