A method includes creating an input matrix of image data for a received input image and responsive to selecting a first image filter for generating an artificial image, the method applies a first filter computation for the first image filter to the input matrix of image data, where applying the first filter computation generates a first resulting matrix of image data. The method concatenates the first resulting matrix of image data to the input matrix of image data to generate a first concatenated matrix of image data. The method generates an artificial image suitable for use in neural networks based on the concatenated matrix of image data.