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 hardwaresoftware 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 applicationspecific 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.

One of the most computationally intensive parts in modern recognition systems is an inference of deep neural networks that are used for image classification, segmentation, enhancement, and recognition. The growing popularity of edge computing makes us look for ways to reduce its time for mobile and embedded devices. One way to decrease the neural network inference time is to modify a neuron model to make it more efficient for computations on a specific device. The example of such a model is a bipolar morphological neuron model. The bipolar morphological neuron is based on the idea of replacing multiplication with addition and maximum operations. This model has been demonstrated for simple image classification with LeNet-like architectures [1]. In the paper, we introduce a bipolar morphological ResNet (BM-ResNet) model obtained from a much more complex ResNet architecture by converting its layers to bipolar morphological ones. We apply BM-ResNet to image classification on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with only a moderate accuracy decrease from 99.3% to 99.1% and from 85.3% to 85.1%. We also estimate the computational complexity of the resulting model. We show that for the majority of ResNet layers, the considered model requires 2.1-2.9 times fewer logic gates for implementation and 15-30% lower latency.

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