A Deep Neuro-Fuzzy Network for Image Classification

The combination of neural network and fuzzy systems into neuro-fuzzy systems integrates fuzzy reasoning rules into the connectionist networks. However, the existing neuro-fuzzy systems are developed under shallow structures having lower generalization capacity. We propose the first end-to-end deep neuro-fuzzy network and investigate its application for image classification. Two new operations are developed based on definitions of Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy model namely fuzzy inference operation and fuzzy pooling operations; stacks of these operations comprise the layers in this network. We evaluate the network on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, finding that the network has a reasonable accuracy in these benchmarks.