Staged training of Neocognitron by evolutionary algorithms

The Neocognitron, inspired by the mammalian visual system, is a complex neural network with numerous parameters and weights which should be trained in order to utilise it for pattern recognition. However, it is not easy to optimise these parameters and weights by gradient decent algorithms. We present a staged training approach using evolutionary algorithms. The experiments demonstrate that evolutionary algorithms can successfully train the Neocognitron to perform image recognition on real world problems.