Optical Machine Learning Using Time-Lens Deep Neural NetWorks

As a high-throughput data analysis technique, photon time stretching (PTS) is widely used in the monitoring of rare events such as cancer cells, rough waves, and the study of electronic and optical transient dynamics. The PTS technology relies on high-speed data collection, and the large amount of data generated poses a challenge to data storage and real-time processing. Therefore, how to use compatible optical methods to filter and process data in advance is particularly important. The time-lens proposed, based on the duality of time and space as an important data processing method derived from PTS, achieves imaging of time signals by controlling the phase information of the timing signals. In this paper, an optical neural network based on the time-lens (TL-ONN) is proposed, which applies the time-lens to the layer algorithm of the neural network to realize the forward transmission of one-dimensional data. The recognition function of this optical neural network for speech information is verified by simulation, and the test recognition accuracy reaches 95.35%. This architecture can be applied to feature extraction and classification, and is expected to be a breakthrough in detecting rare events such as cancer cell identification and screening.