Morphological Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Digit Recognition

Deep neural networks have proved promising results in many applications and fields, but they are still assimilated to a black box. Thus, it is very useful to introduce interpretability aspects to prevent the blind application of deep networks. This paper proposed an interpretable morphological convolutional neural network called Morph-CNN for pattern recognition, where morphological operations were incorporated using counter-harmonic mean into the convolutional layer in order to generate enhanced feature maps. Morph-CNN was extensively evaluated on MNIST and SVHN benchmarks for digit recognition. The different tested configurations showed that Morph-CNN outperforms the existing methods.