Effective feature selection is essential to the development of any intelligent classifier which is intended for use in high-dimension domains. This paper presents an approach that incorporates a rough set-assisted feature reduction method and a neural network-based classifier for image classification. The approach minimises the need for feature extraction without altering the underlying semantics of the features chosen. Through the proposed integration the size of the neural network classifier, which is sensitive to the dimensionality of the dataset, becomes manageable and the network is able to classify images that would otherwise require many more features to represent. Comparative study results from realistic applications demonstrate the success of this work.
