Cellular neural networks: a paradigm for nonlinear spatio-temporal processing

The paradigm of Cellular Neural Networks (CNNs)is going to achieve a complete maturity. In fact, from a methodological point of view, important results on their digitally programmable analog dynamics have been gained, completed with thousands of application routines. This has encouraged the spreading of a great number of applications in the most different disciplines. Moreover, their structure, tailor made for VLSI realization, has led to the production of some chip prototypes that, embedded in a computational infrastructure, have produced the first analogic cellular computers. This completes the framework and makes it possible to realize complex spatio-temporal and filtering tasks on a time scale of microseconds. In this paper some sketches on the main aspects of CNNs, from the formal to the hardware prototype point of view, are presented together with some appealing applications to illustrate complex image, visual and spatio-temporal dynamics processing.