An improved SOM algorithm and its application to color feature extraction

Reducing the redundancy of dominant color features in an image and meanwhile preserving the diversity and quality of extracted colors is of importance in many applications such as image analysis and compression. This paper presents an improved self-organization map (SOM) algorithm namely MFD-SOM and its application to color feature extraction from images. Different from the winner-take-all competitive principle held by conventional SOM algorithms, MFD-SOM prevents, to a certain degree, features of non-principal components in the training data from being weakened or lost in the learning process, which is conductive to preserving the diversity of extracted features. Besides, MFD-SOM adopts a new way to update weight vectors of neurons, which helps to reduce the redundancy in features extracted from the principal components. In addition, we apply a linear neighborhood function in the proposed algorithm aiming to improve its performance on color feature extraction. Experimental results of feature extraction on artificial datasets and benchmark image datasets demonstrate the characteristics of the MFD-SOM algorithm.