An Improved Biomimetic Olfactory Model and Its Application in Traffic Sign Recognition

Abstract

In human and other organisms’ perception, olfaction plays a vital role, and biomimetic olfaction models offer a pathway for studying olfaction. The most optimal existing biomimetic olfaction model is the KIII model proposed by Professor Freeman; however, it still exhibits certain limitations. This study aims to address these limitations: In the feature extraction stage, it introduces adaptive histogram equalization, Gaussian filtering, and discrete cosine transform methods, effectively enhancing and extracting high-quality image features, thereby bolstering the model’s recognition capabilities. To tackle the computational cost issue associated with solving the numerical solutions of neuronal dynamics equations in the KIII model, it replaces the original method with the faster Euler method, reducing time expenses while maintaining good recognition results. In the decision-making stage, several different dissimilarity metrics are compared, and the results indicate that the Spearman correlation coefficient performs best in this context. The improved KIII model is applied to a new domain of traffic sign recognition, demonstrating that it outperforms the baseline KIII model and exhibits certain advantages compared to other models.