Particle Swarm Optimization for Automatic Parameters Determination of Pulse Coupled Neural Network

Pulse coupled neural network (PCNN), a well-known class of neural networks, has original advantage when applied to image processing because of its biological background. However, when PCNN is used, the main problem is that its parameters aren’t self-adapting according to different image which limits the application range of PCNN. Considering that, this paper proposed a new method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) to determine automatically the parameters of PCNN. In this method, the algorithm of PSO is applied to search automatically optimum in the solution space of PCNN’s parameters until finding global optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is accurate and robust for image segmentation, and its performance is better than the methods of Otsu, manual adjustment of parameters when mutual information is adopted as evaluation criteria.