Free-space Optical Neural Network Based on Optical Nonlinearity and Pooling Operations

This is one of the coolest projects I have involved in. For this paper, I did an atomic simulation of an optical element called Saturable Absorber or “SA” in short. The optical absorbtion of this element saturates under high intensity and this property can be utilized to be used as an nonlinear element in the optical neural networks (neural networks that are implemented with a 4f optical system). Optical neural network is a physical implementation of a CNN netowrk where the convlution is implemented by multiplying two images in the fourier space that is achieved using the optical 4F systems.’