Leaf Bagging: A novel meta heuristic optimization based framework for leaf identification

Automated plant recognition based on leaf images is a challenging task among the researchers from several fields. This task requires distinguishing features derived from leaf images for assigning class label to a leaf image. There are several methods in literature for extracting such distinguishing features. In this paper, we propose a novel automated framework for leaf identification. The proposed framework works in multiple phases i.e. pre-processing, feature extraction, classification using bagging approach. Initially, leaf images are pre-processed using image processing operations such as boundary extraction and cropping. In the feature extraction phase, popular nature inspired optimization algorithms viz. Spider Monkey Optimization (SMO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) have been exploited for reducing the dimensionality of features. In the last phase, a leaf image is classified by multiple classifiers and then output of these classifiers is combined using majority voting. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is established based on the experimental results obtained on three datasets i.e. Flavia, Swedish and self-collected leaf images. On all the datasets, it has been observed that the classification accuracy of the proposed method is better than the individual classifiers. Furthermore, the classification accuracy for the proposed approach is comparable to deep learning based method on the Flavia dataset.

     

Multiple features learning for ship classification in optical imagery

The sea surface vessel/ship classification is a challenging problem with enormous implications to the world’s global supply chain and militaries. The problem is similar to other well-studied problems in object recognition such as face recognition. However, it is more complex since ships’ appearance is easily affected by external factors such as lighting or weather conditions, viewing geometry and sea state. The large within-class variations in some vessels also make ship classification more complicated and challenging. In this paper, we propose an effective multiple features learning (MFL) framework for ship classification, which contains three types of features: Gabor-based multi-scale completed local binary patterns (MS-CLBP), patch-based MS-CLBP and Fisher vector, and combination of Bag of visual words (BOVW) and spatial pyramid matching (SPM). After multiple feature learning, feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion are both investigated for final classification. In the proposed framework, typical support vector machine (SVM) classifier is employed to provide posterior-probability estimation. Experimental results on remote sensing ship image datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach shows a consistent improvement on performance when compared to some state-of-the-art methods.     

Learning multi-task local metrics for image annotation

The goal of image annotation is to automatically assign a set of textual labels to an image to describe the visual contents thereof. Recently, with the rapid increase in the number of web images, nearest neighbor (NN) based methods have become more attractive and have shown exciting results for image annotation. One of the key challenges of these methods is to define an appropriate similarity measure between images for neighbor selection. Several distance metric learning (DML) algorithms derived from traditional image classification problems have been applied to annotation tasks. However, a fundamental limitation of applying DML to image annotation is that it learns a single global distance metric over the entire image collection and measures the distance between image pairs in the image-level. For multi-label annotation problems, it may be more reasonable to measure similarity of image pairs in the label-level. In this paper, we develop a novel label prediction scheme utilizing multiple label-specific local metrics for label-level similarity measure, and propose two different local metric learning methods in a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Extensive experimental results on two challenging annotation datasets demonstrate that 1) utilizing multiple local distance metrics to learn label-level distances is superior to using a single global metric in label prediction, and 2) the proposed methods using the MTL framework to learn multiple local metrics simultaneously can model the commonalities of labels, thereby facilitating label prediction results to achieve state-of-the-art annotation performance.     

MetricFusion: Generalized metric swarm learning for similarity measure

Learning distance metrics for measuring the similarity between two data points in unsupervised and supervised pattern recognition has been widely studied in unconstrained face verification tasks. Motivated by the fact that enforcing single distance metric learning for verification via an empirical score threshold is not robust in uncontrolled experimental conditions, we therefore propose to obtain a metric swarm by learning local patches alike sub-metrics simultaneously that naturally formulates a generalized metric swarm learning (GMSL) model with a joint similarity score function solved by an efficient alternative optimization algorithm. Further, each sample pair is represented as a similarity vector via the well-learned metric swarm, such that the face verification task becomes a generalized SVM-alike classification problem. Therefore, the verification can be enforced in the represented metric swarm space that can well improve the robustness of verification under irregular data structure. Experiments are preliminarily conducted using several UCI benchmark datasets for solving general classification problem. Further, the face verification experiments on real-world LFW and PubFig datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art metric learning methods.     

Joint prototype and metric learning for image set classification: Application to video face identification

In this paper, we address the problem of image set classification, where each set contains a different number of images acquired from the same subject. In most of the existing literature, each image set is modeled using all its available samples. As a result, the corresponding time and storage costs are high. To address this problem, we propose a joint prototype and metric learning approach. The prototypes are learned to represent each gallery image set using fewer samples without affecting the recognition performance. A Mahalanobis metric is learned simultaneously to measure the similarity between sets more accurately. In particular, each gallery set is represented as a regularized affine hull spanned by the learned prototypes. The set-to-set distance is optimized via updating the prototypes and the Mahalanobis metric in an alternating manner. To highlight the importance of representing image sets using fewer samples, we analyzed the corresponding test time complexity with respect to the number of images used per set. Experimental results using YouTube Celebrity, YouTube Faces, and ETH-80 datasets illustrate the efficiency on the task of video face recognition, and object categorization.     

基于最大相关熵准则的鲁棒度量学习算法

度量亦称距离函数,是度量空间中满足特定条件的特殊函数,一般用来反映数据间存在的一些重要距离关系.而距离对于各种分类聚类问题影响很大,因此度量学习对于这类机器学习问题有重要影响.受到现实存在的各种噪声影响,已有的各种度量学习算法在处理各种分类问题时,往往出现分类准确率较低以及分类准确率波动大的问题.针对该问题,本文提出一种基于最大相关熵准则的鲁棒度量学习算法.最大相关熵准则的核心在于高斯核函数,本文将其引入到度量学习中,通过构建以高斯核函数为核心的损失函数,利用梯度下降法进行优化,反复测试调整参数,最后得到输出的度量矩阵.通过这样的方法学习到的度量矩阵将有更好的鲁棒性,在处理受噪声影响的各种分类问题时,将有效地提高分类准确率.本文将在一些常用机器学习数据集（UCI）还有人脸数据集上进行验证实验.     

迁移度量学习行人再识别算法

行人再识别技术是计算机视觉领域中一个具有挑战性的任务。该任务针对个体的外观变化模式展开研究,特征变化剧烈,存在小样本问题,而通过提出的一种基于迁移学习的度量学习模型,可约束不同数据集样本分布的差异,实现度量模型在不同数据集上的迁移。该算法不仅增强了度量模型训练样本的多样性,提高了分辨能力,同时提升了样本的适应性。最后,通过在iLIDS数据集进行度量模型的预训练,并在VIPeR和CUHK01两个数据集上进行的迁移学习,验证了算法的有效性和准确性。     

基于改进CNN-RANSAC的水下图像特征配准方法

水对光的吸收和散射效应降低了水下图像的质量,水下图像的可视范围受到限制,复杂水下场景下的鲁棒性和精确性问题使得特征提取与匹配成为一项具有挑战性的任务。为了更好地配准水下图像,提出了一种改进CNN-RANSAC的水下图像特征配准方法,首先通过基于深度卷积神经网络的水下图像增强方法对水下图像进行增强预处理,通过水下图像分类数据集迁移学习训练VGGNet-16网络框架,利用修改后的网络框架进行特征提取,生成鲁棒的多尺度特征描述符与特征点,经过特征粗匹配与动态内点选择,使用改进的RANSAC方法剔除误匹配点。在大量水下图像数据集上进行了充分的特征提取和特征匹配实验,与基于SIFT和SURF的配准方法相比,该方法能够检测到更多的特征点,实现了匹配正确率的大幅度提高。     

单幅图像去雨数据集和深度学习算法的联合评估与展望

雨天会影响室外图像捕捉的质量,进而引起户外视觉任务性能下降。基于深度学习的单幅图像去雨研究因算法性能优越而引起了大家的关注,并且聚焦点集中在数据集的质量、图像去雨方法、单幅图像去雨后续高层任务的研究和性能评价指标等方面。为了方便研究者快速全面了解该领域,本文从上述4个方面综述了基于深度学习的单幅图像去雨的主流文献。依据数据集的构建方式将雨图数据集分为4类：基于背景雨层简单加和、背景雨层复杂融合、生成对抗网络 (generative adversarial network,GAN)数据驱动合成的数据集,以及半自动化采集的真实数据集。依据任务场景、采取的学习机制以及网络设计对主流算法分类总结。综述了面向单任务和联合任务的去雨算法,单任务即雨滴、雨纹、雨雾和暴雨的去除;联合任务即雨滴和雨纹、所有噪声去除。综述了学习机制和网络构建方式(比如:卷积神经网络 (convolutional neural network,CNN)结构多分支组合,GAN的生成结构,循环和多阶段结构,多尺度结构,编解码结构,基于注意力,基于Transformer)以及数据模型双驱动的构建方式。综述了单幅图像去雨后续高层任务的研究文献和图像去雨算法性能的评价指标。通过合成数据集和真实数据集上的综合实验对比,证实了领域知识隐式引导网络构建可以有效提升算法性能,领域知识显式引导正则化网络的学习有潜力进一步提升算法的泛化性。最后,指出单幅图像去雨工作目前面临的挑战和未来的研究方向。     

基于自监督增强特征的直推式零样本图像分类

图像的视觉特征对实现零样本图像分类有至关重要的作用.尽管目前VGG、GoogLeNet和ResNet等网络提取的深度特征在图像分类领域获得了广泛的应用,但其在零样本图像分类问题上的表现并不理想,仍旧存在较大的提升空间.此外,由于零样本学习场景下训练集与测试集不相交的设定,导致分类网络不可避免地存在领域偏移问题.为此,提出一种基于自监督增强特征的直推式零样本图像分类框架.首先,通过辅助任务构造伪标签,利用自监督学习获得图像的自监督特征并将其与无监督深度特征进行特征融合;然后,将融合特征嵌入语义空间中进行零样本图像分类,并获得未见类的初始预测标签;最后,利用未见类特征和预测标签迭代地优化视觉-语义映射.所提出框架组件可选择,框架组件自监督网络、主干网络和降维网络分别选用CFN、VGG16和PCA构成网络.在CUB、SUN和AwA2数据集上的实验结果表明,所提出网络能够增强特征的判别能力,在零样本图像分类问题上表现良好.     

Subspace learning for unsupervised feature selection via matrix factorization

Dimensionality reduction is an important and challenging task in machine learning and data mining. Feature selection and feature extraction are two commonly used techniques for decreasing dimensionality of the data and increasing efficiency of learning algorithms. Specifically, feature selection realized in the absence of class labels, namely unsupervised feature selection, is challenging and interesting. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised feature selection criterion developed from the viewpoint of subspace learning, which is treated as a matrix factorization problem. The advantages of this work are four-fold. First, dwelling on the technique of matrix factorization, a unified framework is established for feature selection, feature extraction and clustering. Second, an iterative update algorithm is provided via matrix factorization, which is an efficient technique to deal with high-dimensional data. Third, an effective method for feature selection with numeric data is put forward, instead of drawing support from the discretization process. Fourth, this new criterion provides a sound foundation for embedding kernel tricks into feature selection. With this regard, an algorithm based on kernel methods is also proposed. The algorithms are compared with four state-of-the-art feature selection methods using six publicly available datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that in terms of clustering results, the proposed two algorithms come with better performance than the others for almost all datasets we experimented with here.     

Image Annotation by Propagating Labels from Semantic Neighbourhoods

Automatic image annotation aims at predicting a set of semantic labels for an image. Because of large annotation vocabulary, there exist large variations in the number of images corresponding to different labels (“class-imbalance”). Additionally, due to the limitations of human annotation, several images are not annotated with all the relevant labels (“incomplete-labelling”). These two issues affect the performance of most of the existing image annotation models. In this work, we propose 2-pass k-nearest neighbour (2PKNN) algorithm. It is a two-step variant of the classical k-nearest neighbour algorithm, that tries to address these issues in the image annotation task. The first step of 2PKNN uses “image-to-label” similarities, while the second step uses “image-to-image” similarities, thus combining the benefits of both. We also propose a metric learning framework over 2PKNN. This is done in a large margin set-up by generalizing a well-known (single-label) classification metric learning algorithm for multi-label data. In addition to the features provided by Guillaumin et al. (2009) that are used by almost all the recent image annotation methods, we benchmark using new features that include features extracted from a generic convolutional neural network model and those computed using modern encoding techniques. We also learn linear and kernelized cross-modal embeddings over different feature combinations to reduce semantic gap between visual features and textual labels. Extensive evaluations on four image annotation datasets (Corel-5K, ESP-Game, IAPR-TC12 and MIRFlickr-25K) demonstrate that our method achieves promising results, and establishes a new state-of-the-art on the prevailing image annotation datasets.     

Person re-identification by discriminant analytical least squares metric learning

Person re-identification means retrieving a same person in large amounts of images among disjoint camera views. An effective and robust similarity measure between a person image pair plays an important role in the re-identification tasks. In this work, we propose a new metric learning method based on least squares for person re-identification. Specifically, the similar training images pairs are used to learn a linear transformation matrix by being projected to finite discrete discriminant points using regression model; then, the metric matrix can be deduced by solving least squares problem with a closed form solution. We call it discriminant analytical least squares (DALS) metric. In addition, we develop the incremental learning scheme of DALS, which is particularly valuable in model retraining when given additional samples. Furthermore, DALS could be effectively kernelized to further improve the matching performance. Extensive experiments on the VIPeR, GRID, PRID450S and CUHK01 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.     

基于图卷积网络的多标签遥感图像分类

由于遥感图像包含物体类别多样,单个语义类别标签无法全面地描述图像内容,而多标签图像分类任务更加具有挑战性.通过探索深度图卷积网络(GCN),解决了多标签遥感图像分类缺乏对标签语义信息相关性利用的问题,提出了一种新的基于图卷积的多标签遥感图像分类网络,它包含图像特征学习模块、基于图卷积网络的分类器学习模块和图像特征差异化模块三个部分.在公开多标签遥感数据集Planet和UCM上与相关模型进行对比,在多标签遥感图像分类任务上可以得到了较好的分类结果.该方法使用图卷积等模块将多标签图像分类方法应用到遥感领域,提高了模型分类能力,缩短了模型训练时间.     

HeteClass: A Meta-path based framework for transductive classification of objects in heterogeneous information networks

Transductive classification using labeled and unlabeled objects in a heterogeneous information network for knowledge extraction is an interesting and challenging problem. Most of the real-world networks are heterogeneous in their natural setting and traditional methods of classification for homogeneous networks are not suitable for heterogeneous networks. In a heterogeneous network, various meta-paths connecting objects of the target type, on which classification is to be performed, make the classification task more challenging. The semantic of each meta-path would lead to the different accuracy of classification. Therefore, weight learning of meta-paths is required to leverage their semantics simultaneously by a weighted combination. In this work, we propose a novel meta-path based framework, HeteClass, for transductive classification of target type objects. HeteClass explores the network schema of the given network and can also incorporate the knowledge of the domain expert to generate a set of meta-paths. The regularization based weight learning method proposed in HeteClass is effective to compute the weights of symmetric as well as asymmetric meta-paths in the network, and the weights generated are consistent with the real-world understanding. Using the learned weights, a homogeneous information network is formed on target type objects by the weighted combination, and transductive classification is performed. The proposed framework HeteClass is flexible to utilize any suitable classification algorithm for transductive classification and can be applied on heterogeneous information networks with arbitrary network schema. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the HeteClass for classification of unlabeled objects in heterogeneous information networks using real-world data sets.     

基于轻量级迁移学习的无人机航拍视频图像天气场景分类

针对传统航拍视频图像CNN模型天气分类效果差、无法满足移动设备应用以及现有天气图像数据集匮乏且场景单一的问题, 构建了晴天、雨天、雪天、雾天4类面向多场景的无人机航拍天气图像数据集, 并提出了基于轻量级迁移学习的无人机航拍视频图像天气场景分类模型. 该模型采用迁移学习的方法, 在ImageNet数据集上训练好两种轻量级CNN, 并设计3个轻量级CNN分支进行特征提取. 特征提取首先采用ECANet注意力机制改进的EfficientNet-b0作为主分支提取整幅图像特征, 并使用两个MobileNetv2分支分别对天空和非天空局部独有的深层特征进行提取. 其次, 通过Concatenate将这3个区域进行特征融合. 最后, 使用Softmax层对4类天气场景实现分类. 实验结果表明, 该方法应用于移动等计算受限设备时对于天气场景分类的识别准确率达到了97.3%, 有着较好的分类效果.