Morphological Network: How Far Can We Go with Morphological Neurons?

In recent years, the idea of using morphological operations as networks has received much attention. Mathematical morphology provides very efficient and useful image processing and image analysis tools based on basic operators like dilation and erosion, defined in terms of kernels. Many other morphological operations are built up using the dilation and erosion operations. Although the learning of structuring elements such as dilation or erosion using the backpropagation algorithm is not new, the order and the way these morphological operations are used is not standard. In this paper, we have theoretically analyzed the use of morphological operations for processing 1D feature vectors and shown that this gets extended to the 2D case in a simple manner. Our theoretical results show that a morphological block represents a sum of hinge functions. Hinge functions are used in many places for classification and regression tasks (Breiman (1993)). We have also proved a universal approximation theorem -- a stack of two morphological blocks can approximate any continuous function over arbitrary compact sets. To experimentally validate the efficacy of this network in real-life applications, we have evaluated its performance on satellite image classification datasets since morphological operations are very sensitive to geometrical shapes and structures. We have also shown results on a few tasks like segmentation of blood vessels from fundus images, segmentation of lungs from chest x-ray and image dehazing. The results are encouraging and further establishes the potential of morphological networks.Comment: 35 pages, 19 figures, 7 table

Neural computation as a tool for galaxy classification : methods and examples

We apply and compare various Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and other algorithms for automatic morphological classification of galaxies. The ANNs are presented here mathematically, as non-linear extensions of conventional statistical methods in Astronomy. The methods are illustrated using different subsets Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and other algorithms for automatic morphological classification of galaxies. The ANNs are presented here mathematically, as non-linear extensions of conventional statistical methods in Astronomy. The methods are illustrated using different subsets from the ESO-LV catalogue, for which both machine parameters and human classification are available. The main methods we explore are: (i) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which tells how independent and informative the input parameters are. (ii) Encoder Neural Network which allows us to find both linear (PCA-like) and non-linear combinations of the input, illustrating an example of unsupervised ANN. (iii) Supervised ANN (using the Backpropagation or Quasi-Newton algorithms) based on a training set for which the human classification is known. Here the output for previously unclassified galaxies can be interpreted as either a continuous (analog) output (e.g. $T$-type) or a Bayesian {\it a posteriori} probability for each class. Although the ESO-LV parameters are sub-optimal, the success of the ANN in reproducing the human classification is 2 $T$-type units, similar to the degree of agreement between two human experts who classify the same galaxy images on plate material. We also examine the aspects of ANN configurations, reproducibility, scaling of input parameters and redshift information.Comment: uuencoded compressed postscript. The preprint is also available at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/preprint/PrePrint.htm

A broad-coverage distributed connectionist model of visual word recognition

In this study we describe a distributed connectionist model of morphological processing, covering a realistically sized sample of the English language. The purpose of this model is to explore how effects of discrete, hierarchically structured morphological paradigms, can arise as a result of the statistical sub-regularities in the mapping between word forms and word meanings. We present a model that learns to produce at its output a realistic semantic representation of a word, on presentation of a distributed representation of its orthography. After training, in three experiments, we compare the outputs of the model with the lexical decision latencies for large sets of English nouns and verbs. We show that the model has developed detailed representations of morphological structure, giving rise to effects analogous to those observed in visual lexical decision experiments. In addition, we show how the association between word form and word meaning also give rise to recently reported differences between regular and irregular verbs, even in their completely regular present-tense forms. We interpret these results as underlining the key importance for lexical processing of the statistical regularities in the mappings between form and meaning

A Learning Framework for Morphological Operators using Counter-Harmonic Mean

We present a novel framework for learning morphological operators using counter-harmonic mean. It combines concepts from morphology and convolutional neural networks. A thorough experimental validation analyzes basic morphological operators dilation and erosion, opening and closing, as well as the much more complex top-hat transform, for which we report a real-world application from the steel industry. Using online learning and stochastic gradient descent, our system learns both the structuring element and the composition of operators. It scales well to large datasets and online settings.Comment: Submitted to ISMM'1