Bipolar Morphological Neural Networks: Gate-Efficient Architecture for Computer Vision

The priority of building hardware-oriented neural network models is growing steadily. The target goals for their development are the performance and energy efficiency of promising hardware-software solutions. Simultaneously, for different classes of computing architectures of the computer, the optimal neural network models will differ. The most interesting from a practical point of view are application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and central processing units (CPUs). We have recently proposed a bipolar morphological network as a hardware-oriented model for these computer types, the computationally intensive parts of which use only maximum and addition. In this work, we present for the first time a theoretical assessment of the expressive power of a neural network consisting of BM neurons and show that it corresponds to the expressive power of the classical multilayer perceptron. In addition, we summarize the current results on the use of the bipolar morphological model in typical tasks of technical vision: image classification and semantic segmentation. We consider simple LeNet-5-like neural networks, as well as deeper ResNet and UNet architectures. We show that BM networks demonstrate accuracy that allows their practical use, with significantly higher performance in terms of a transistor budget for two (ASIC, FPGA) of the three architectures under consideration. The source code of the model and ResNet experiments are available at https://github.com/SmartEngines/bipolar-morphological-resnet.