Coarse-to-fine boundary location with a SOM-like method.

A coarse-to-fine boundary location with a self-organizing map (SOM)-like method is proposed in this paper. Inspired from the conventional SOM and universal gravitation, given a small quantity of supervision seeds from the desired boundaries, neurons are used to evolve to the desired boundaries in a coarse-to-fine framework. The major components of this framework are the designs of union action and evolving rate. In the course of neuron evolution, the union actions acting on these neurons will offer them the evolving directions. Also controlled by the corresponding referenced gradients, the neurons' evolving rates are adaptively adjusted at different positions. With the union actions and evolving rates, the neurons will evolve with appropriate manners to expand the set of feature points on the desired boundaries. The newly expanded feature points will cause the generation updates for feature points and neurons, and offer new information to guide the new generation of neurons to the boundaries. What is more, the proposed multiround evolution is as well a coarse-to-fine way for boundary location. Experiments and comparisons show that the proposed method performs well in complex long concavities, inhomogeneous and weak boundary location with good initialization flexibility.