Sharif Digital Repository

Despite various optical realizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), optical implementation of nonlinear activation functions and pooling operations are still challenging problems. In this regard, this paper proposes an optical saturable absorption nonlinearity and its atomic-level model, as well as two various optical pooling operations, namely optical average pooling and optical motion pooling, by means of 4f optical correlators. Proposing these optical building blocks not only speed up the neural networks due to negligible optical processing latency, but also facilitate the concatenation of optical convolutional layers with no optoelectrical conversions in-between, as the...