WEIGHTED FINITE TRANSDUCERS IN IMAGE-PROCESSING

Culik and Karhumaki studied weighted finite automata (WFA) as devices computing real functions. The main motivation was to give specificatio ns of graytone images as local grayness functions. Culik and Kari gave an algorithm for automatic image encoding using WFA as a basis for a practical image data compression method. In this paper we introduce k- tape weighted finite automata. We are mainly interested in the case of 2 tapes called weighted finite transducers (WFT). We show that the mo st commonly used image transformations can be defined by WFTs. We also show that WFT transformations are closed under union and composition and that the family of WFA images is closed under WFT transformations.