scholarly journals Evolving deep forest with automatic feature extraction for image classification using genetic programming

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.


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

IEEE Feature extraction is essential for solving image classification by transforming low-level pixel values into high-level features. However, extracting effective features from images is challenging due to high variations across images in scale, rotation, illumination, and background. Existing methods often have a fixed model complexity and require domain expertise. Genetic programming with a flexible representation can find the best solution without the use of domain knowledge. This paper proposes a new genetic programming-based approach to automatically learning informative features for different image classification tasks. In the new approach, a number of image-related operators, including filters, pooling operators and feature extraction methods, are employed as functions. A flexible program structure is developed to integrate different functions and terminals into a single tree/solution. The new approach can evolve solutions of variable depths to extract various numbers and types of features from the images. The new approach is examined on 12 different image classification tasks of varying difficulty and compared with a large number of effective algorithms. The results show that the new approach achieves better classification performance than most benchmark methods. The analysis of the evolved programs/solutions and the visualisation of the learned features provide deep insights on the proposed approach.


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

IEEE Feature extraction is essential for solving image classification by transforming low-level pixel values into high-level features. However, extracting effective features from images is challenging due to high variations across images in scale, rotation, illumination, and background. Existing methods often have a fixed model complexity and require domain expertise. Genetic programming with a flexible representation can find the best solution without the use of domain knowledge. This paper proposes a new genetic programming-based approach to automatically learning informative features for different image classification tasks. In the new approach, a number of image-related operators, including filters, pooling operators and feature extraction methods, are employed as functions. A flexible program structure is developed to integrate different functions and terminals into a single tree/solution. The new approach can evolve solutions of variable depths to extract various numbers and types of features from the images. The new approach is examined on 12 different image classification tasks of varying difficulty and compared with a large number of effective algorithms. The results show that the new approach achieves better classification performance than most benchmark methods. The analysis of the evolved programs/solutions and the visualisation of the learned features provide deep insights on the proposed approach.


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.


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

© 2017 IEEE. In image classification, region detection is an effective approach to reducing the dimensionality of the image data but requires human intervention. Genetic Programming (GP) as an evolutionary computation technique can automatically identify important regions, and conduct feature extraction, feature construction and classification simultaneously. In this paper, an automatic region detection and processing approach in GP (GP-RDP) method is proposed for image classification. This approach is able to evolve important image operators to deal with detected regions for facilitating feature extraction and construction. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, five recent GP methods and seven non-GP methods based on three types of image features are used for comparison on four image data sets. The results reveal that the proposed method can achieve comparable performance on easy data sets and significantly better performance on difficult data sets than the other comparable methods. To further demonstrate the interpretability and understandability of the proposed method, two evolved programs are analysed. The analysis shows the good interpretability of the GP-RDP method and proves that the GP-RDP method is able to identify prominent regions, evolve effective image operators to process these regions, extract and construct good features for efficient image classification.


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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