Image segmentation by networks of spiking neurons

A network of leaky integrate-and-fire (IAF) neurons is proposed to segment gray-scale images. The network architecture with local competition between neurons that encode segment assignments of image blocks is motivated by a histogram clustering approach to image segmentation. Lateral excitatory connections between neighboring image sites yield a local smoothing of segments. The mean firing rate of class membership neurons encodes the image segmentation. A weight modification scheme is proposed that estimates segment-specific prototypical histograms. The robustness properties of the network implementation make it amenable to an analog VLSI realization. Results on synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture.