Associative memory design for 256 gray-level images using a multilayer neural network

A design procedure is presented for neural associative memories storing gray-scale images. It is an evolution of a previous work based on the decomposition of the image with 2^L gray levels into L binary patterns, stored in L uncoupled neural networks. In this letter, an L-layer neural network is proposed with both intralayer and interlayer connections. The connections between different layers introduce interactions among all the neurons, increasing the recall performance with respect to the uncoupled case. In particular, the proposed network can store images with the commonly used number of 256 gray levels instead of 16, as in the previous approach.