A Fast Self-Organizing Map Algorithm for Handwritten Digit Recognition

Abstract

This paper presents a fast version of the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm, which simplifies the weight distance calculation, the learning rate function and the neighborhood function by removing complex computations. Simplification accelerates the training process in software simulation and is applied in the field of handwritten digit recognition. According to the evaluation results of the software prototype, a 15–20 % speed-up in the runtime is obtained compared with the conventional SOM. Furthermore, the fast SOM accelerator can recognize over 81 % of handwritten digit test samples correctly, which is slightly worse than the conventional SOM, but much better than other simplified SOM methods.