A dynamically coupled neural oscillator network for image segmentation

We propose a dynamically coupled neural oscillator network for image segmentation. Instead of pair-wise coupling, an ensemble of oscillators coupled in a local region is used for grouping. We introduce a set of neighborhoods to generate dynamical coupling structures associated with a specific oscillator. Based on the proximity and similarity principles, two grouping rules are proposed to explicitly consider the distinct cases of whether an oscillator is inside a homogeneous image region or near a boundary between different regions. The use of dynamical coupling makes our segmentation network robust to noise on an image, and unlike image processing algorithms no iterative operation is needed for noise removal. For fast computation, a segmentation algorithm is abstracted from the underlying oscillatory dynamics, and has been applied to synthetic and real images. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our oscillator network in image segmentation. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.