Neural network edge detector

Extracting edges from images is a widely used first step in image processing. A different view on the well known enhancement/thresholding approach for edge detection is presented in this paper. The structure of a two layer feed forward neural network is comparable to the structure of enhancement/thresholding edge detectors. It is possible to calculate an optimal edge detector with a certain predefined network structure and training set, by training the neural network with examples of edge and non-edge patterns. The back propagation learning rule is used for optimization of the network. The choice of the network structure and the training set are very important, because they determine the final behaviour of the network. The paper describes which network structures were selected and how the training sets were generated. Some of the experiments are described, and observations of the convolution kernels for edge enhancement that are formed during training. Finally the results are evaluated and compared with the results of edge detectors based on the Sobel, Marr-Hildreth and Canny edge enhancement algorithms. It appears that the neural network edge detector can be made very robust against noise and blur and in most tests outperforms the others.</p

Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks

Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging

Empirical Study of Car License Plates Recognition

The number of vehicles on the road has increased drastically in recent years. The license plate is an identity card for a vehicle. It can map to the owner and further information about vehicle. License plate information is useful to help traffic management systems. For example, traffic management systems can check for vehicles moving at speeds not permitted by law and can also be installed in parking areas to se-cure the entrance or exit way for vehicles. License plate recognition algorithms have been proposed by many researchers. License plate recognition requires license plate detection, segmentation, and charac-ters recognition. The algorithm detects the position of a license plate and extracts the characters. Various license plate recognition algorithms have been implemented, and each algorithm has its strengths and weaknesses. In this research, I implement three algorithms for detecting license plates, three algorithms for segmenting license plates, and two algorithms for recognizing license plate characters. I evaluate each of these algorithms on the same two datasets, one from Greece and one from Thailand. For detecting li-cense plates, the best result is obtained by a Haar cascade algorithm. After the best result of license plate detection is obtained, for the segmentation part a Laplacian based method has the highest accuracy. Last, the license plate recognition experiment shows that a neural network has better accuracy than other algo-rithm. I summarize and analyze the overall performance of each method for comparison