A domain independent Genetic Programming approach to automatic feature extraction for image classification

Author(s):  
Daniel Atkins ◽  
Kourosh Neshatian ◽  
Mengjie Zhang
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Feature extraction is an essential process for image data dimensionality reduction and classification. However, feature extraction is very difficult and often requires human intervention. Genetic Programming (GP) can achieve automatic feature extraction and image classification but the majority of existing methods extract low-level features from raw images without any image-related operations. Furthermore, the work on the combination of image-related operators/descriptors in GP for feature extraction and image classification is limited. This paper proposes a multi-layer GP approach (MLGP) to performing automatic high-level feature extraction and classification. A new program structure, a new function set including a number of image operators/descriptors and two region detectors, and a new terminal set are designed in this approach. The performance of the proposed method is examined on six different data sets of varying difficulty and compared with five GP based methods and 42 traditional image classification methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better or comparable performance than these baseline methods. Further analysis on the example programs evolved by the proposed MLGP method reveals the good interpretability of MLGP and gives insight into how this method can effectively extract high-level features for image classification.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Feature extraction is an essential process for image data dimensionality reduction and classification. However, feature extraction is very difficult and often requires human intervention. Genetic Programming (GP) can achieve automatic feature extraction and image classification but the majority of existing methods extract low-level features from raw images without any image-related operations. Furthermore, the work on the combination of image-related operators/descriptors in GP for feature extraction and image classification is limited. This paper proposes a multi-layer GP approach (MLGP) to performing automatic high-level feature extraction and classification. A new program structure, a new function set including a number of image operators/descriptors and two region detectors, and a new terminal set are designed in this approach. The performance of the proposed method is examined on six different data sets of varying difficulty and compared with five GP based methods and 42 traditional image classification methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better or comparable performance than these baseline methods. Further analysis on the example programs evolved by the proposed MLGP method reveals the good interpretability of MLGP and gives insight into how this method can effectively extract high-level features for image classification.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Deep forest is an alternative to deep neural networks to use multiple layers of random forests without back-propagation for solving various problems. In this study, we propose a genetic programming-based approach to automatically and simultaneously evolving effective structures of deep forest connections and extracting informative features for image classification. First, in the new approach we define two types of modules: forest modules and feature extraction modules. Second, an encoding strategy is developed to integrate forest modules and feature extraction modules into a tree and the search strategy is introduced to search for the best solution. With these designs, the proposed approach can automatically extract image features and find forests with effective structures simultaneously for image classification. The parameters in the forest can be dynamically determined during the learning process of the new approach. The results show that the new approach can achieve better performance on the datasets having a small number of training instances and competitive performance on the datasets having a large number of training instances. The analysis of evolved solutions shows that the proposed approach uses a smaller number of random forests over the deep forest method.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020. Deep forest is an alternative to deep neural networks to use multiple layers of random forests without back-propagation for solving various problems. In this study, we propose a genetic programming-based approach to automatically and simultaneously evolving effective structures of deep forest connections and extracting informative features for image classification. First, in the new approach we define two types of modules: forest modules and feature extraction modules. Second, an encoding strategy is developed to integrate forest modules and feature extraction modules into a tree and the search strategy is introduced to search for the best solution. With these designs, the proposed approach can automatically extract image features and find forests with effective structures simultaneously for image classification. The parameters in the forest can be dynamically determined during the learning process of the new approach. The results show that the new approach can achieve better performance on the datasets having a small number of training instances and competitive performance on the datasets having a large number of training instances. The analysis of evolved solutions shows that the proposed approach uses a smaller number of random forests over the deep forest method.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 624
Author(s):  
Stefan Rohrmanstorfer ◽  
Mikhail Komarov ◽  
Felix Mödritscher

With the always increasing amount of image data, it has become a necessity to automatically look for and process information in these images. As fashion is captured in images, the fashion sector provides the perfect foundation to be supported by the integration of a service or application that is built on an image classification model. In this article, the state of the art for image classification is analyzed and discussed. Based on the elaborated knowledge, four different approaches will be implemented to successfully extract features out of fashion data. For this purpose, a human-worn fashion dataset with 2567 images was created, but it was significantly enlarged by the performed image operations. The results show that convolutional neural networks are the undisputed standard for classifying images, and that TensorFlow is the best library to build them. Moreover, through the introduction of dropout layers, data augmentation and transfer learning, model overfitting was successfully prevented, and it was possible to incrementally improve the validation accuracy of the created dataset from an initial 69% to a final validation accuracy of 84%. More distinct apparel like trousers, shoes and hats were better classified than other upper body clothes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harith Al-Sahaf ◽  
Mengjie Zhang ◽  
Mark Johnston

In the computer vision and pattern recognition fields, image classification represents an important yet difficult task. It is a challenge to build effective computer models to replicate the remarkable ability of the human visual system, which relies on only one or a few instances to learn a completely new class or an object of a class. Recently we proposed two genetic programming (GP) methods, one-shot GP and compound-GP, that aim to evolve a program for the task of binary classification in images. The two methods are designed to use only one or a few instances per class to evolve the model. In this study, we investigate these two methods in terms of performance, robustness, and complexity of the evolved programs. We use ten data sets that vary in difficulty to evaluate these two methods. We also compare them with two other GP and six non-GP methods. The results show that one-shot GP and compound-GP outperform or achieve results comparable to competitor methods. Moreover, the features extracted by these two methods improve the performance of other classifiers with handcrafted features and those extracted by a recently developed GP-based method in most cases.


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