Application of RBF neural network improved by peak density function in intelligent color matching of wood dyeing

Abstract According to the characteristics of wood dyeing, we propose a predictive model of pigment formula for wood dyeing based on Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network. In practical application, however, it is found that the number of neurons in the hidden layer of RBF neural network is difficult to determine. In general, we need to test several times according to experience and prior knowledge, which is lack of a strict design procedure on theoretical basis. And we also don’t know whether the RBF neural network is convergent. This paper proposes a peak density function to determine the number of neurons in the hidden layer. In contrast to existing approaches, the centers and the widths of the radial basis function are initialized by extracting the features of samples. So the uncertainty caused by random number when initializing the training parameters and the topology of RBF neural network is eliminated. The average relative error of the original RBF neural network is 1.55% in 158 epochs. However, the average relative error of the RBF neural network which is improved by peak density function is only 0.62% in 50 epochs. Therefore, the convergence rate and approximation precision of the RBF neural network are improved significantly.