International Journal of Neural Systems

The goal of image chromatic adaptation is to remove the effect of illumination and to obtain color data that reflects precisely the physical contents of the scene. We present in this paper an approach to image chromatic adaptation using Neural Networks (NN) with application for detecting — adapting human skin color. The NN is trained on randomly chosen color images containing human subject under various illuminating conditions, thereby enabling the model to dynamically adapt to the changing illumination conditions. The proposed network predicts directly the illuminant estimate in the image so as to adapt to human skin color. The comparison of our method with Gray World, White Patch and NN on White Patch methods for skin color stabilization is presented. The skin regions in the NN stabilized images are successfully detected using a computationally inexpensive thresholding operation. We also present results on detecting skin regions on a data set of test images. The results are promising and suggest a new approach for adapting human skin color using neural networks.

Neural networks are investigated for predicting the magnitude of the largest seismic event in the following month based on the analysis of eight mathematically computed parameters known as seismicity indicators. The indicators are selected based on the Gutenberg-Richter and characteristic earthquake magnitude distribution and also on the conclusions drawn by recent earthquake prediction studies. Since there is no known established mathematical or even empirical relationship between these indicators and the location and magnitude of a succeeding earthquake in a particular time window, the problem is modeled using three different neural networks: a feed-forward Levenberg-Marquardt backpropagation (LMBP) neural network, a recurrent neural network, and a radial basis function (RBF) neural network. Prediction accuracies of the models are evaluated using four different statistical measures: the probability of detection, the false alarm ratio, the frequency bias, and the true skill score or R score. The models are trained and tested using data for two seismically different regions: Southern California and the San Francisco bay region. Overall the recurrent neural network model yields the best prediction accuracies compared with LMBP and RBF networks. While at the present earthquake prediction cannot be made with a high degree of certainty this research provides a scientific approach for evaluating the short-term seismic hazard potential of a region.

Sufficient conditions are obtained for the existence and global exponential stability of a unique periodic solution of a class of impulsive tow-neuron networks with variable and unbounded delays. The approaches are based on Mawhin's continuation theorem of coincidence degree theory and Lyapunov functions.

This paper presents new theoretical results on global exponential stability of bi-directional associative memory neural networks with distributed delays and reaction-diffusion terms based on the inequality technique, Lyapunov functional, and analysis technique. The results remove the usual assumption that the activation functions are of monotonous or differential character. Exponential converging velocity index is estimated, which depends on the delay kernel functions and system parameters. Finally, two numerical examples are given to show the validity and feasibility of our results.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the case that neurons can not be considered as individuals in the system, so they need to be treated as a continuum. In this paper, we have proved that if the interconnection of neural field is symmetric, then every trajectory of the system converges to an equilibrium. For the case that the interconnection is asymmetric, we give a sufficient condition which can guarantee that the equilibria of the neural field is unique and it also a global attractor.