scholarly journals A gaussian filter-based feature learning approach using genetic programming to image classification

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. To learn image features automatically from the problems being tackled is more effective for classification. However, it is very difficult due to image variations and the high dimensionality of image data. This paper proposes a new feature learning approach based on Gaussian filters and genetic programming (GauGP) for image classification. Genetic programming (GP) is a well-known evolutionary learning technique and has been applied to many visual tasks, showing good learning ability and interpretability. In the proposed GauGP method, a new program structure, a new function set and a new terminal set are developed, which allow it to detect small regions from the input image and to learn discriminative features using Gaussian filters for image classification. The performance of GauGP is examined on six different data sets of varying difficulty and compared with four GP methods, eight traditional approaches and convolutional neural networks. The experimental results show GauGP achieves significantly better or similar performance in most cases.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. To learn image features automatically from the problems being tackled is more effective for classification. However, it is very difficult due to image variations and the high dimensionality of image data. This paper proposes a new feature learning approach based on Gaussian filters and genetic programming (GauGP) for image classification. Genetic programming (GP) is a well-known evolutionary learning technique and has been applied to many visual tasks, showing good learning ability and interpretability. In the proposed GauGP method, a new program structure, a new function set and a new terminal set are developed, which allow it to detect small regions from the input image and to learn discriminative features using Gaussian filters for image classification. The performance of GauGP is examined on six different data sets of varying difficulty and compared with four GP methods, eight traditional approaches and convolutional neural networks. The experimental results show GauGP achieves significantly better or similar performance in most cases.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© 2019 IEEE. Evolutionary deep learning (EDL) as a hot topic in recent years aims at using evolutionary computation (EC) techniques to address existing issues in deep learning. Most existing work focuses on employing EC methods for evolving hyper-parameters, deep structures or weights for neural networks (NNs). Genetic programming (GP) as an EC method is able to achieve deep learning due to the characteristics of its representation. However, many current GP-based EDL methods are limited to binary image classification. This paper proposed a new GP-based EDL method with convolution operators (COGP) for feature learning on binary and multi-class image classification. A novel flexible program structure is developed to allow COGP to evolve solutions with deep or shallow structures. Associated with the program structure, a new function set and a new terminal set are developed in COGP. The experimental results on six different image classification data sets of varying difficulty demonstrated that COGP achieved significantly better performance in most comparisons with 11 effectively competitive methods. The visualisation of the best program further revealed the high interpretability of the solutions found by COGP.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

© 2019 IEEE. Evolutionary deep learning (EDL) as a hot topic in recent years aims at using evolutionary computation (EC) techniques to address existing issues in deep learning. Most existing work focuses on employing EC methods for evolving hyper-parameters, deep structures or weights for neural networks (NNs). Genetic programming (GP) as an EC method is able to achieve deep learning due to the characteristics of its representation. However, many current GP-based EDL methods are limited to binary image classification. This paper proposed a new GP-based EDL method with convolution operators (COGP) for feature learning on binary and multi-class image classification. A novel flexible program structure is developed to allow COGP to evolve solutions with deep or shallow structures. Associated with the program structure, a new function set and a new terminal set are developed in COGP. The experimental results on six different image classification data sets of varying difficulty demonstrated that COGP achieved significantly better performance in most comparisons with 11 effectively competitive methods. The visualisation of the best program further revealed the high interpretability of the solutions found by COGP.


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.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Bing Xue ◽  
Mengjie Zhang

Being able to learn discriminative features from low-quality images has raised much attention recently due to their wide applications ranging from autonomous driving to safety surveillance. However, this task is difficult due to high variations across images, such as scale, rotation, illumination, and viewpoint, and distortions in images, such as blur, low contrast, and noise. Image preprocessing could improve the quality of the images, but it often requires human intervention and domain knowledge. Genetic programming (GP) with a flexible representation can automatically perform image preprocessing and feature extraction without human intervention. Therefore, this study proposes a new evolutionary learning approach using GP (EFLGP) to learn discriminative features from images with blur, low contrast, and noise for classification. In the proposed approach, we develop a new program structure (individual representation), a new function set, and a new terminal set. With these new designs, EFLGP can detect small regions from a large input low-quality image, select image operators to process the regions or detect features from the small regions, and output a flexible number of discriminative features. A set of commonly used image preprocessing operators is employed as functions in EFLGP to allow it to search for solutions that can effectively handle low-quality image data. The performance of EFLGP is comprehensively investigated on eight datasets of varying difficulty under the original (clean), blur, low contrast, and noise scenarios, and compared with a large number of benchmark methods using handcrafted features and deep features. The experimental results show that EFLGP achieves significantly better or similar results in most comparisons. The results also reveal that EFLGP is more invariant than the benchmark methods to blur, low contrast, and noise.


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

© 2005-2012 IEEE. Being able to extract effective features from different images is very important for image classification, but it is challenging due to high variations across images. By integrating existing well-developed feature descriptors into learning algorithms, it is possible to automatically extract informative high-level features for image classification. As a learning algorithm with a flexible representation and good global search ability, genetic programming can achieve this. In this paper, a new genetic programming-based feature learning approach is developed to automatically select and combine five existing well-developed descriptors to extract high-level features for image classification. The new approach can automatically learn various numbers of global and/or local features from different types of images. The results show that the new approach achieves significantly better classification performance in almost all the comparisons on eight data sets of varying difficulty. Further analysis reveals the effectiveness of the new approach to finding the most effective feature descriptors or combinations of them to extract discriminative features for different classification tasks.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Bi ◽  
Mengjie Zhang ◽  
Bing Xue

© 2018 IEEE. Feature extraction is an essential process to image classification. Existing feature extraction methods can extract important and discriminative image features but often require domain expert and human intervention. Genetic Programming (GP) can automatically extract features which are more adaptive to different image classification tasks. However, the majority GP-based methods only extract relatively simple features of one type i.e. local or global, which are not effective and efficient for complex image classification. In this paper, a new GP method (GP-GLF) is proposed to achieve automatically and simultaneously global and local feature extraction to image classification. To extract discriminative image features, several effective and well-known feature extraction methods, such as HOG, SIFT and LBP, are employed as GP functions in global and local scenarios. A novel program structure is developed to allow GP-GLF to evolve descriptors that can synthesise feature vectors from the input image and the automatically detected regions using these functions. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on four different image classification data sets of varying difficulty and compared with seven GP based methods and a set of non-GP methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves significantly better or similar performance than almost all the peer methods. Further analysis on the evolved programs shows the good interpretability of the GP-GLF method.


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