Growing neural gas for vision tasks with time restrictions

Abstract

Self-organizing neural networks try to preserve the topology of an input space by means of their competitive learning. This capacity is being used for the representation of objects and their motion. In addition, these applications usually have real-time constraints. In this work, diverse variants of a self-organizing network, the Growing Neural Gas, that allow an acceleration of the learning process are considered. However, this increase of speed causes that, in some cases, topology preservation is lost and, therefore, the quality of the representation. So, we have made a study to quantify topology preservation using different measures to establish the most suitable learning parameters, depending on the size of the network and on the available time for its adaptation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.