Neuro-fuzzy synergism to the intelligent system for edge detection and enhancement

The paper presents a fuzzy neural network system for edge detection and enhancement. The system can both: (a) obtain edges and (b) enhance edges by recovering missing edges and eliminate false edges caused by noise. The research is comprised of three stages, namely, adaptive fuzzification which is employed to fuzzify the input patterns, edge detection by a three-layer feedforward fuzzy neural network, and edge enhancement by a modified Hopfield neural network. The typical sample patterns are first fuzzified. Then they are used to train the proposed fuzzy neural network. After that, the trained network is able to determine the edge elements with eight orientations. Pixels having high edge membership are traced for further processing. Based on constraint satisfaction and the competitive mechanism, interconnections among neurons are determined in the Hopfield neural network. A criterion is provided to find the final stable result that contains the enhanced edge measurement. The proposed neural networks are simulated on a SUN Sparc station. One hundred and twenty-three training samples are well chosen to cover all the edge and non-edge cases and the performance of the system will not be improved by adding more training samples. Test images are degraded by random noise up to 30% of the original images. Compared with standard edge detection operators and enhancement techniques, the proposed system based on the neuro-fuzzy synergism obtains very good results. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.