The identification of cellular automata

Although cellular automata have been widely studied as a class of the spatio temporal systems, very few investigators have studied how to identify the CA rules given observations of the patterns. A solution using a polynomial realization to describe the CA rule is reviewed in the present study based on the application of an orthogonal least squares algorithm. Three new neighbourhood detection methods are then reviewed as important preliminary analysis procedures to reduce the complexity of the estimation. The identification of excitable media is discussed using simulation examples and real data sets and a new method for the identification of hybrid CA is introduced

Cellular automata as a tool for image processing

An overview is given on the use of cellular automata for image processing. We first consider the number of patterns that can exist in a neighbourhood, allowing for invariance to certain transformation. These patterns correspond to possible rules, and several schemes are described for automatically learning an appropriate rule set from training data. Two alternative schemes are given for coping with gray level (rather than binary) images without incurring a huge explosion in the number of possible rules. Finally, examples are provided of training various types of cellular automata with various rule identification schemes to perform several image processing tasks