Some Open Questions on Morphological Operators and Representations in the Deep Learning Era - A Personal Vision

Abstract

“Work on deep learning or perish”: folklore wisdom in 2021. During recent years, the renaissance of neural networks as the major machine learning paradigm and more specifically, the confirmation that deep learning techniques provide state-of-the-art results for most of computer vision tasks has been shaking up traditional research in image processing. The same can be said for research in communities working on applied harmonic analysis, information geometry, variational methods, etc. For many researchers, this is viewed as an existential threat. On the one hand, research funding agencies privilege mainstream approaches especially when these are unquestionably suitable for solving real problems and for making progress on artificial intelligence. On the other hand, successful publishing of research in our communities is becoming almost exclusively based on a quantitative improvement of the accuracy of any benchmark task. As most of my colleagues sharing this research field, I am confronted with the dilemma of continuing to invest my time and intellectual effort on mathematical morphology as my driving force for research, or simply focussing on how to use deep learning and contributing to it. The solution is not obvious to any of us since our research is not fundamental, it is just oriented to solve challenging problems, which can be more or less theoretical. Certainly, it would be foolish for anyone to claim that deep learning is insignificant or to think that one’s favourite image processing domain is productive enough to ignore the state-of-the-art. I fully understand that Notes for Keynote at DGMM’2021 (IAPR International Conference on Discrete Geometry and Mathematical Morphology), Uppsala University, Sweden, May 24-27, 2020.