Genetic programming for region detection, feature extraction, feature construction and classification in image data

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Image analysis is a key area in the computer vision domain that has many applications. Genetic Programming (GP) has been successfully applied to this area extensively, with promising results. Highlevel features extracted from methods such as Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HoG) are commonly used for object detection with machine learning techniques. However, GP techniques are not often used with these methods, despite being applied extensively to image analysis problems. Combining the training process of GP with the powerful features extracted by SURF or HoG has the potential to improve the performance by generating high-level, domain-tailored features. This paper proposes a new GP method that automatically detects different regions of an image, extracts HoG features from those regions, and simultaneously evolves a classifier for image classification. By extending an existing GP region selection approach to incorporate the HoG algorithm, we present a novel way of using high-level features with GP for image classification. The ability of GP to explore a large search space in an efficient manner allows all stages of the new method to be optimised simultaneously, unlike in existing approaches. The new approach is applied across a range of datasets, with promising results when compared to a variety of well-known machine learning techniques. Some high-performing GP individuals are analysed to give insight into how GP can effectively be used with high-level features for image classification.