Strategies to Enhance Pattern Recognition in Neural Networks Based on the Insect Olfactory System

Some strategies used by the insect olfactory system to enhace its discrimination capability are an heterogeneous neural threshold distribution, gain control and sparse activity. To test the influence of these mechanisms on the performance for a classification task, we propose a neural network based on the insect olfactory system. In this model, we introduce a regulation term to control de activity of neurons and a structured connectivity between antennal lobe and mushroom body based on recent findings in Drosophila that differs from the classical stochastic approach. Results show that the model achieves better results for high sparseness and low connectivity between Kenyon cells and projection neurons. For this configuration, the use of gain control further improves performance. The structured connectivity model proposed is able to achieve the same discrimination capacity without using gain control or activiy regulation techniques, which opens up interesting possibilities.