Neural pattern recognition with multi-scale pyramidal coding and selective attention

A new neural network architecture for spatial pattern recognition using multi-scale pyramidal coding is described. The network has an ARTMAP structure with a new class of ART-module, called hybrid ART-module, as its front-end processor. The hybrid ART-module, which has processing modules corresponding to each scale channel of multi-scale pyramid, employs channels of finer scales only if it is necessary to discriminate a pattern from others. This process is effected by serial match tracking. Also, the parallel match tracking is used to select the spatial location having most salient feature and limit its attention to that part.