HopNet based Associative Memory as FC layer in CNN for Odia Character Classification

A deep neural network such as convolutional neural network is a popular and most commonly applied technique in image processing for classification for the last few years. The overhead of the feature extraction step will be avoided due to the implicit feature extraction nature of convolutional neural network (CNN) and these extracted features contain substantial information that could be sufficient for an image classification problem. Fully connected (FC) layers in CNN take the results of the last convolution and/or pooling layer and then use them to recognize or classifying images into labels. In this paper, we present an associative memory-based model named Hopfield network as a fully connected layer to store patterns for classification in CNN architecture like LeNet-5. The main purpose of using Hopfield network is to avoid backpropagation as it is a fully connected recurrent network as the state-of-art results which we have obtained are comparable with other models. To measure the performance of the new architecture, we used NIT, Rourkela, Odia characters dataset and compared it with other models for classification.