New Hardware Architecture for Self-Organizing Map Used for Color Vector Quantization

In this paper, we present a new generic architectural approach of a Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The proposed architecture, called the Diagonal-SOM (D-SOM), is described as an Hardware- Description-Language as an intellectual property kernel with easily adjustable parameters.The D-SOM architecture is based on a generic formalism that exploits two levels of the nested parallelism of neurons and connections. This solution is therefore considered as a system based on the cooperation of a distributed set of independent computations. The organization and structure of these calculations process an oriented data flow in order to find a better treatment distribution between different neuroprocessors. To validate the D-SOM architecture, we evaluate the performance of several SOM network architectures after their integration on a Xilinx Virtex-7 Field Programmable Gate Array support. The proposed solution allows the easy adaptation of learning to a large number of SOM topologies without any considerable design effort. 16 x 16 SOM hardware is validated through FPGA implementation, where temporal performance is almost twice as fast as that obtained in the recent literature. The suggested D-SOM architecture is also validated through simulation on variable-sized SOM networks applied to color vector quantization.