On the application of reservoir computing networks for noisy image recognition

Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Kris Demuynck, Wesley De Neve, Jean Pierre Martens

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

57 Scopus citations

Abstract

Reservoir Computing Networks (RCNs) are a special type of single layer recurrent neural networks, in which the input and the recurrent connections are randomly generated and only the output weights are trained. Besides the ability to process temporal information, the key points of RCN are easy training and robustness against noise. Recently, we introduced a simple strategy to tune the parameters of RCNs. Evaluation in the domain of noise robust speech recognition proved that this method was effective. The aim of this work is to extend that study to the field of image processing, by showing that the proposed parameter tuning procedure is equally valid in the field of image processing and conforming that RCNs are apt at temporal modeling and are robust with respect to noise. In particular, we investigate the potential of RCNs in achieving competitive performance on the well-known MNIST dataset by following the aforementioned parameter optimizing strategy. Moreover, we achieve good noise robust recognition by utilizing such a network to denoise images and supplying them to a recognizer that is solely trained on clean images. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed RCN-based handwritten digit recognizer achieves an error rate of 0.81 percent on the clean test data of the MNIST benchmark and that the proposed RCN-based denoiser can effectively reduce the error rate on the various types of noise.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)237-248
Number of pages12
JournalNeurocomputing
Volume277
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 14 2018
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Artificial Intelligence

Keywords

  • Image classification
  • Image denoising
  • Recurrent neural networks
  • Reservoir computing networks
  • Text recognition

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