Hao Zong, Cong Hu Yuan, Chao Bei, Wentao Chen, Huan Liu, Kaiyu Huang, Degen Huang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

This article is concerned with designing a tobacco leaves classifier through fuzzy clustering-based neural networks, which leverage multiple histogram analyses of images. The key issue of the study is to recognize high-quality and low-quality tobacco leaves only by using color images obtained from real industrial areas. This study applies multiple histogram analyses from different color spaces as image preprocessing to extract the meaningful features from high-resolution images. Dimensionality reduction is performed through principal component analysis to extract essential features to reduce model complexity and alleviate overfitting problems. In a classifier, we apply fuzzy clustering-based neural networks that incorporate fuzzy clustering techniques, especially fuzzy C-means clustering, along with a cross-entropy loss function and its learning mechanism. The process of setting and training the membership function of node in the hidden layer is substituted with fuzzy C-means clustering. Also, Softmax function produces the model's output in terms of class probabilities. The cost function of the networks is determined using the cross-entropy loss function, while the learning process involves Newton's method-based iterative nonlinear least square error estimation. The experiment validates the competitiveness of the proposed design methodology using real tobacco images obtained from the industry. The performance of the proposed classifier is compared against other classifiers previously reported in the literature to demonstrate its effectiveness.