Physics-Constrained Comprehensive Optical Neural Networks

However, the performance of the ONN model is often diminished by the gap between the ideal simulated system and the actual physical system. To bridge the gap, this work conducts extensive experiments to investigate systematic errors in the optical physical system within the context of image classification tasks. To address these systematic errors, a physics-constrained ONN learning framework is constructed, including a well designed loss function to mitigate the effect of light fluctuations, a CCD adjustment strategy to alleviate the effects of exposure time mismatches and a'physics-prior based' error compensation network to manage other systematic errors, ensuring consistent light intensity across experimental results and simulations. In our experiments, the proposed method achieved a test classification accuracy of 96.5% on the MNIST dataset, a substantial improvement over the 61.6% achieved with the original ONN. For the more challenging QuickDraw16 and Fashion MNIST datasets, experimental accuracy improved from 63.0% to 85.7% and from 56.2% to 77.5%, respectively.