Mimicry mechanism model of octopus epidermis pattern by inverse operation of Turing reaction model

TL;DR

This paper proposes a cellular automaton-based model inspired by the Turing reaction model to simulate octopus skin pattern formation and mimicry, enabling quick feature extraction and pattern reconstruction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cellular automaton approach to emulate octopus skin pattern mimicry based on the Turing model, facilitating efficient pattern analysis and reconstruction.

Findings

The model can generate various patterns with two parameters.

It allows feature extraction and pattern reconstruction with minimal computation.

Potential application in low-calculation machine learning models.

Abstract

Many cephalopods such as octopus and squid change their skin color purposefully within a very short time. Furthermore, it is widely known that some octopuses have the ability to change the color and unevenness of the skin and to mimic the surroundings in short time. However, much research has not been done on the entire mimicry mechanism in which the octopus recognizes the surrounding landscape and changes the skin pattern. It seems that there is no hypothetical model to explain the whole mimicry mechanism yet. In this study, the mechanism of octopus skin pattern formation was assumed to be based on the Turing model. Here, the pattern formation by the Turing model was realized by the equivalent filter calculation model using the cellular automaton, instead of directly solving the differential equations. It was shown that this model can create various patterns with two feature parameters. Furthermore, for the eyes recognition part where two features are extracted from the Turing pattern image, our study proposed a method that can be calculated back with small amount of calculation using the characteristics of the cellular Turing pattern model. These two calculations can be expressed in the same mathematical frame based on the cellular automaton model using the convolution filter. As a result, it can be created a model which is capable of extracting features from patterns and reconstructing patterns in a short time, the model is considered to be a basic model for considering the mimicry mechanism of octopus. Also, in terms of application to machine learning, it is considered that it shows the possibility of leading to a model with a small amount of learning calculation.