ARTEX: A Self-organizing Architecture for Classifying Image Regions

Automatic processing of visual scenes often begins by detecting regions of an image with common values of simple local features, such as texture, and mapping the pattern offeatureactivation into a predicted region label. We develop a self-organizing neural architecture, called the ARTEX algorithm, for automatically extracting a novel and effective array of such features and mapping them to output region labels. ARTEXis made up of biologically motivated networks, the Boundary Contour System and Feature Contour System (BCS/FCS) networks for visual feature extraction (Cohen& Grossberg, 1984; Grossberg & Mingolla, 1985a, 1985b; Grossberg & Todorovic, 1988; Grossberg, Mingolla, & Williamson, 1995), and the Gaussian ARTMAP (GAM) network for classification (Williamson, 1996). ARTEX is first evaluated on a difficult real-world task, classifying regions of synthetic apertureradar (SAR) images, where it reliably achieves high resolution (single 874 S.Grossberg and 1. R. Williamson pixel) classification results, and creates accurate probability maps for its class predictions. ARTEXis then evaluated on classification of natural textures, where it outperforms the texture classification system in Greenspan, Goodman, Chellappa, & Anderson (1994) using comparable preprocessing and training conditions. 2 FEATURE EXTRACTION NETWORKS