Development of a novel activation function based on Chebyshev polynomials: an aid for classification and denoising of images

The main objective of this paper is to improve the efficiency and accuracy of convolutional neural network models for image classification and denoising tasks. The focus of the study is on enhancing the activation layer of these models, which is a critical component that determines the output of each neuron in the network. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel activation function based on Chebyshev polynomials, which is both data-driven and self-learnable. In addition to proposing the LIP model, the authors investigate its performance in approximating various nonlinearities and determine its Lipschitz bound. The study then evaluates the performance of the proposed activation function by conducting experiments on multiple datasets using different convolutional neural network models. The results show that the proposed activation function outperforms other activation layers and significantly enhances the accuracy of image classification and denoising tasks.