The Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) is a biologically plausible computational architecture for sparse coding, where a signal is represented as a linear combination of elements from an over-complete dictionary. In this paper we map the LCA algorithm on the brain-inspired, IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System. We discuss data structures and representation as well as the architecture of functional processing units that perform non-linear threshold, vector-matrix multiplication. We also present the design of the micro-architectural units that facilitate the implementation of dynamical based iterative algorithms. Experimental results with the LCA algorithm using the limited precision, fixed-point arithmetic on TrueNorth compare favorably with results using floating-point computations on a general purpose computer. The scaling of the LCA algorithm within the constraints of the TrueNorth is also discussed.
Navigating unmanned aerial vehicles in precarious environments is of great importance. It is necessary to rely on alternative information processing techniques to attain spatial information that is required for navigation in such settings. This paper introduces a novel deep learning-based approach for navigating that exclusively relies on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The proposed method utilizes deep neural networks (DNNs) for image matching, retrieval, and registration. To this end, we introduce Deep Cosine Similarity Neural Networks (DCSNNs) for mapping SAR images to a global descriptive feature vector. We also introduce a fine-tuning algorithm for DC-SNNs, and DCSNNs are used to generate a database of feature vectors for SAR images that span a geographic area of interest, which, in turn, are compared against a feature vector of an inquiry image. Images similar to the inquiry are retrieved from the database by using a scalable distance measure between the feature vector outputs of DCSNN. Methods for reranking the retrieved SAR images that are used to update position coordinates of an inquiry SAR image by estimating from the best retrieved SAR image are also introduced. Numerical experiments comparing with baselines on the Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images are presented.
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