A complete system for NN classification based on a VLSI array processor

This paper describes a VLSI array processor system designed and built for classification problems based on the k-nearest-neighbors approach. This architecture is suitable for different pattern recognition applications and is very efficient for high-dimensional databases. The architecture is scalable with the size of the recognition problem making the system effectively applicable to computational intensive application like on-line pattern recognition. A system prototype composed of a board with two processors, the software driver and a test application have been built and evaluated. For handwritten character recognition task the complete system shows a speed up of 260 times over a sequential algorithm running on a Sun SPARC20 workstation.