PSO-SVM hybrid system for melanoma detection from histo-pathological images

This paper introduces an automated system for skin cancer (melanoma) detection from Histo-pathological images sampled from microscopic slides of skin biopsy. The proposed system is a hybrid system based on Particle Swarm Optimization and Support Vector Machine (PSO-SVM). The features used are extracted from the grayscale image histogram, the co-occurrence matrix and the energy of the wavelet coefficients resulting from the wavelet packet decomposition. The PSO-SVM system selects the best feature set and the best values for the SVM parameters (C and γ) that optimize the performance of the SVM classifier.   The system performance is tested on a real dataset obtained from the Southern Pathology Laboratory in Wollongong NSW, Australia. Evaluation results show a classification accuracy of 87.13%, a sensitivity of 94.1% and a specificity of 80.22%.The sensitivity and specificity results are comparable to those obtained by dermatologists

Manifold Constrained Low-Rank Decomposition

Low-rank decomposition (LRD) is a state-of-the-art method for visual data reconstruction and modelling. However, it is a very challenging problem when the image data contains significant occlusion, noise, illumination variation, and misalignment from rotation or viewpoint changes. We leverage the specific structure of data in order to improve the performance of LRD when the data are not ideal. To this end, we propose a new framework that embeds manifold priors into LRD. To implement the framework, we design an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method which efficiently integrates the manifold constraints during the optimization process. The proposed approach is successfully used to calculate low-rank models from face images, hand-written digits and planar surface images. The results show a consistent increase of performance when compared to the state-of-the-art over a wide range of realistic image misalignments and corruptions

Fuzzy rule-based alertness state classification based on the optimization of EEG rhythm/channel combinations

This paper presents a method for automatically selecting the optimal EEG rhythm/channel combination capable of classifying the different human alertness states. We considered four alertness states, namely 'engaged', 'calm', 'drowsy', and 'asleep'. Energies associated with the conventional EEG rhythms, δ, θ, α, ß and γ, extracted from overlapping segments of the different EEG channels were used as features. The proposed method is a two-stage process. In the first stage, the optimal brain regions, represented by a set of EEG channels, are identified. In the second stage, a fuzzy rule-based alertness classification system (FRBACS) is developed to select the optimal EEG rhythms extracted from the previously selected EEG channels. The IF-THEN rules used in FRBACS are constructed using a novel bi-level differential evolution (DE) based search algorithm. Unlike most of the existing classification methods, the proposed classification approach reveals easy to interpret rules that describe each of the alertness states