  The current study uses a novel method of multilevel neurons and high order
synchronization effects described by a family of special metrics, for pattern
recognition in an oscillatory neural network (ONN). The output oscillator
(neuron) of the network has multilevel variations in its synchronization value
with the reference oscillator, and allows classification of an input pattern
into a set of classes. The ONN model is implemented on thermally-coupled
vanadium dioxide oscillators. The ONN is trained by the simulated annealing
algorithm for selection of the network parameters. The results demonstrate that
ONN is capable of classifying 512 visual patterns (as a cell array 3 * 3,
distributed by symmetry into 102 classes) into a set of classes with a maximum
number of elements up to fourteen. The classification capability of the network
depends on the interior noise level and synchronization effectiveness
parameter. The model allows for designing multilevel output cascades of neural
networks with high net data throughput. The presented method can be applied in
ONNs with various coupling mechanisms and oscillator topology.
