Selected aspects of complex, hypercomplex and fuzzy neural networks

This short report reviews the current state of the research and methodology on theoretical and practical aspects of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). It was prepared to gather state-of-the-art knowledge needed to construct complex, hypercomplex and fuzzy neural networks. The report reflects the individual interests of the authors and, by now means, cannot be treated as a comprehensive review of the ANN discipline. Considering the fast development of this field, it is currently impossible to do a detailed review of a considerable number of pages. The report is an outcome of the Project 'The Strategic Research Partnership for the mathematical aspects of complex, hypercomplex and fuzzy neural networks' meeting at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland, organized in September 2022.

A new approach to descriptors generation for image retrieval by analyzing activations of deep neural network layers

In this paper, we consider the problem of descriptors construction for the task of content-based image retrieval using deep neural networks. The idea of neural codes, based on fully connected layers activations, is extended by incorporating the information contained in convolutional layers. It is known that the total number of neurons in the convolutional part of the network is large and the majority of them have little influence on the final classification decision. Therefore, in the paper we propose a novel algorithm that allows us to extract the most significant neuron activations and utilize this information to construct effective descriptors. The descriptors consisting of values taken from both the fully connected and convolutional layers perfectly represent the whole image content. The images retrieved using these descriptors match semantically very well to the query image, and also they are similar in other secondary image characteristics, like background, textures or color distribution. These features of the proposed descriptors are verified experimentally based on the IMAGENET1M dataset using the VGG16 neural network.