Pattern Analysis with Layered Self-Organizing Maps

1. Abstract Abstract— This paper defines a new learning architecture, Layered Self-Organizing Maps (LSOMs), that uses the SOM and supervised-SOM learning algorithms. The architecture is validated with the MNIST database of hand-written digit images. LSOMs are similar to convolutional neural nets (covnets) in the way they sample data, but different in the way they represent features and learn. LSOMs analyze (or generate) image patches with maps of exemplars determined by the SOM learning algorithm rather than feature maps from filter-banks learned via backprop.