Small-world Hopfield neural networks with weight salience priority and memristor synapses for digit recognition

A novel systematic design of associative memory networks is addressed in this paper, by incorporating both the biological small-world effect and the recently acclaimed memristor into the conventional Hopfield neural network. More specifically, the original fully connected Hopfield network is diluted by considering the small-world effect, based on a preferential connection removal criteria, i.e., weight salience priority. The generated sparse network exhibits comparable performance in associative memory but with much less connections. Furthermore, a hardware implementation scheme of the small-world Hopfield network is proposed using the experimental threshold adaptive memristor (TEAM) synaptic-based circuits. Finally, performance of the proposed network is validated by illustrative examples of digit recognition.