How to train a Matlab Neural Network using matrices as inputs?

Question

I am making 8 x 8 tiles of Images and I want to train a RBF Neural Network in Matlab using those tiles as inputs. I understand that I can convert the matrix into a vector and use it. But is there a way to train them as matrices? (to preserve the locality) Or is there any other technique to solve this problem?

Answer 1

There is no way to use a matrix as an input to such a neural network, but anyway this won't change anything:

Assume you have any neural network with an image as input, one hidden layer, and the output layer. There will be one weight from every input pixel to every hidden unit. All weights are initialized randomly and then trained using backpropagation. The development of these weights does not depend on any local information - it only depends on the gradient of the output error with respect to the weight. Having a matrix input will therefore make no difference to having a vector input.

For example, you could make a vector out of the image, shuffle that vector in any way (as long as you do it the same way for all images) and the result would be (more or less, due to the random initialization) the same.

The way to handle local structures in the input data is using convolutional neural networks (CNN).