Publication

Autonomy Artificial Intelligence Robotics (AAIR)
2021

RAPID HIGH-DIMENSIONAL SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION WITH ECHO STATE NETWORKS

by S. Gardner; M.R. Haider; J. Smereka; P. Jayakumar; K. Kulkarni; D. Gorsich; L. Moradi; V. Vantsevich

Abstract

Recurrent Neural Networks have largely been explored for low-dimensional time-series tasks due to their fading memory properties, which is not needed for feed-forward methods like the Convolutional Neural Network. However, benefits of using a recurrent-based neural network (i.e. reservoir computing) for time-independent inputs includes faster training times, lower training requirements, and reduced computational burdens, along with competitive performances to standard machine learning methods. This is especially important for high-dimensional signals like complex images. In this report, a modified Echo State Network (ESN) is introduced and evaluated for its ability to perform semantic segmentation. The parallel ESN containing 16 parallel reservoirs has an image processing time of 2 seconds with an 88% classification rate of 3 classes, with no prior feature extraction or normalization, and a training time of under 2 minutes.