Adaptive associative memories capable of pattern segmentation

This paper presents an adaptive type of associative memory (AAM) that can separate patterns from composite inputs which might be degraded by deficiency or noise and that can recover incomplete or noisy single patterns. The behavior of AAM is analyzed in terms of stability, giving the stable solutions (results of recall), and the recall of spurious memories (the undesired solutions) is shown to be greatly reduced compared with earlier types of associative memory that can perform pattern segmentation. Two conditions that guarantee the nonexistence of undesired solutions are also given. Results of computer experiments show that the performance of AAM is much better than that of the earlier types of associative memory in terms of pattern segmentation and pattern recovery.