A Survey on Evolutionary Computation for Computer Vision and Image Analysis: Past, Present, and Future Trends

Computer vision (CV) is a big and important field in artificial intelligence covering a wide range of applications. Image analysis is a major task in CV aiming to extract, analyse and understand the visual content of images. However, imagerelated tasks are very challenging due to many factors, e.g., high variations across images, high dimensionality, domain expertise requirement, and image distortions. Evolutionary computation (EC) approaches have been widely used for image analysis with significant achievement. However, there is no comprehensive survey of existing EC approaches to image analysis. To fill this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive survey covering all essential EC approaches to important image analysis tasks including edge detection, image segmentation, image feature analysis, image classification, object detection, and others. This survey aims to provide a better understanding of evolutionary computer vision (ECV) by discussing the contributions of different approaches and exploring how and why EC is used for CV and image analysis. The applications, challenges, issues, and trends associated to this research field are also discussed and summarised to provide further guidelines and opportunities for future research

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a heuristic global optimization method, proposed originally by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995. It is now one of the most commonly used optimization techniques. This survey presented a comprehensive investigation of PSO. On one hand, we provided advances with PSO, including its modifications (including quantum-behaved PSO, bare-bones PSO, chaotic PSO, and fuzzy PSO), population topology (as fully connected, von Neumann, ring, star, random, etc.), hybridization (with genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, Tabu search, artificial immune system, ant colony algorithm, artificial bee colony, differential evolution, harmonic search, and biogeography-based optimization), extensions (to multiobjective, constrained, discrete, and binary optimization), theoretical analysis (parameter selection and tuning, and convergence analysis), and parallel implementation (in multicore, multiprocessor, GPU, and cloud computing forms). On the other hand, we offered a survey on applications of PSO to the following eight fields: electrical and electronic engineering, automation control systems, communication theory, operations research, mechanical engineering, fuel and energy, medicine, chemistry, and biology. It is hoped that this survey would be beneficial for the researchers studying PSO algorithms

Coastal wetland mapping with sentinel-2 MSI imagery based on gravitational optimized multilayer perceptron and morphological attribute profiles.

Coastal wetland mapping plays an essential role in monitoring climate change, the hydrological cycle, and water resources. In this study, a novel classification framework based on the gravitational optimized multilayer perceptron classifier and extended multi-attribute profiles (EMAPs) is presented for coastal wetland mapping using Sentinel-2 multispectral instrument (MSI) imagery. In the proposed method, the morphological attribute profiles (APs) are firstly extracted using four attribute filters based on the characteristics of wetlands in each band from Sentinel-2 imagery. These APs form a set of EMAPs which comprehensively represent the irregular wetland objects in multiscale and multilevel. The EMAPs and original spectral features are then classified with a new multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier whose parameters are optimized by a stability-constrained adaptive alpha for a gravitational search algorithm. The performance of the proposed method was investigated using Sentinel-2 MSI images of two coastal wetlands, i.e., the Jiaozhou Bay and the Yellow River Delta in Shandong province of eastern China. Comparisons with four other classifiers through visual inspection and quantitative evaluation verified the superiority of the proposed method. Furthermore, the effectiveness of different APs in EMAPs were also validated. By combining the developed EMAPs features and novel MLP classifier, complicated wetland types with high within-class variability and low between-class disparity were effectively discriminated. The superior performance of the proposed framework makes it available and preferable for the mapping of complicated coastal wetlands using Sentinel-2 data and other similar optical imagery

A Survey on Evolutionary Computation Approaches to Feature Selection

Feature selection is an important task in data mining and machine learning to reduce the dimensionality of the data and increase the performance of an algorithm, such as a classification algorithm. However, feature selection is a challenging task due mainly to the large search space. A variety of methods have been applied to solve feature selection problems, where evolutionary computation (EC) techniques have recently gained much attention and shown some success. However, there are no comprehensive guidelines on the strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches. This leads to a disjointed and fragmented field with ultimately lost opportunities for improving performance and successful applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art work on EC for feature selection, which identifies the contributions of these different algorithms. In addition, current issues and challenges are also discussed to identify promising areas for future research.</p

Optimum Feature Selection for Recognizing Objects from Satellite Imagery Using Genetic Algorithm

Object recognition is a research area that aims to associate objects to categories or classes. Usually recognition of object specific geospatial features, as building, tree, mountains, roads, and rivers from high-resolution satellite imagery is a time consuming and expensive problem in the maintenance cycle of a Geographic Information System (GIS). Feature selection is the task of selecting a small subset from original features that can achieve maximum classification accuracy and reduce data dimensionality. This subset of features has some very important benefits like, it reduces computational complexity of learning algorithms, saves time, improve accuracy and the selected features can be insightful for the people involved in problem domain. This makes feature selection as an indispensable task in classification task. In our work, we propose wrapper approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) as an optimization algorithm to search the space of all possible subsets related to object geospatial features set for the purpose of recognition. GA is wrapped with three different classifier algorithms namely neural network, k-nearest neighbor and decision tree J48 as subset evaluating mechanism. The GA-ANN, GA-KNN and GA-J48 methods are implemented using the WEKA software on dataset that contains 38 extracted features from satellite images using ENVI software. The proposed wrapper approach incorporated the Correlation Ranking Filter (CRF) for spatial features to remove unimportant features. Results suggest that GA based neural classifiers and using CRF for spatial features are robust and effective in finding optimal subsets of features from large data sets

A review of quantum-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for automatic clustering

In real-world scenarios, identifying the optimal number of clusters in a dataset is a difficult task due to insufficient knowledge. Therefore, the indispensability of sophisticated automatic clus tering algorithms for this purpose has been contemplated by some researchers. Several automatic clustering algorithms assisted by quantum-inspired metaheuristics have been developed in recent years. However, the literature lacks definitive documentation of the state-of-the-art quantum-inspired metaheuristic algorithms for automatically clustering datasets. This article presents a brief overview of the automatic clustering process to establish the importance of making the clustering process automatic. The fundamental concepts of the quantum computing paradigm are also presented to highlight the utility of quantum-inspired algorithms. This article thoroughly analyses some algo rithms employed to address the automatic clustering of various datasets. The reviewed algorithms were classified according to their main sources of inspiration. In addition, some representative works of each classification were chosen from the existing works. Thirty-six such prominent algorithms were further critically analysed based on their aims, used mechanisms, data specifications, merits and demerits. Comparative results based on the performance and optimal computational time are also presented to critically analyse the reviewed algorithms. As such, this article promises to provide a detailed analysis of the state-of-the-art quantum-inspired metaheuristic algorithms, while highlighting their merits and demerits.Web of Science119art. no. 201

Sample supervised search centric approaches in geographic object-based image analysis

Sample supervised search centric image segmentation denotes a general method where quality segments are generated based on the provision of a selection of reference segments. The main purpose of such a method is to correctly segment a multitude of identical elements in an image based on these reference segments. An efficient search algorithm traverses the parameter space of a given segmentation algorithm. A supervised quality measure guides the search for the best segmentation results, or rather the best performing parameter set. This method, which is academically pursued in the context of remote sensing and elsewhere, shows promise in assisting the generation of earth observation information products. The method may find applications specifically within the context of user driven geographic object-based image analysis approaches, mainly in respect of very high resolution optical data. Rapid mapping activities as well as general land-cover mapping or targeted element identification may benefit from such a method. In this work it is suggested that sample supervised search centric geographic segment generation forms the basis of a set of methods, or rather a methodological avenue. The original formulation of the method, although promising, is limited in the quality of the segments it can produce – it is still limited by the inherent capability of the given segmentation algorithm. From an optimisation viewpoint, various structures may be encoded forming the fitness or search landscape traversed by a given search algorithm. These structures may interact or have an interplay with the given segmentation algorithm. Various method variants considering expanded fitness landscapes are possible. Additional processes, or constituents, such as data mapping, classification and post-segmentation heuristics may be embedded into such a method. Three distinct and novel method variants are proposed and evaluated based on this concept of expanded fitness landscapes

A scattering and repulsive swarm intelligence algorithm for solving global optimization problems

The firefly algorithm (FA), as a metaheuristic search method, is useful for solving diverse optimization problems. However, it is challenging to use FA in tackling high dimensional optimization problems, and the random movement of FA has a high likelihood to be trapped in local optima. In this research, we propose three improved algorithms, i.e., Repulsive Firefly Algorithm (RFA), Scattering Repulsive Firefly Algorithm (SRFA), and Enhanced SRFA (ESRFA), to mitigate the premature convergence problem of the original FA model. RFA adopts a repulsive force strategy to accelerate fireflies (i.e. solutions) to move away from unpromising search regions, in order to reach global optimality in fewer iterations. SRFA employs a scattering mechanism along with the repulsive force strategy to divert weak neighbouring solutions to new search regions, in order to increase global exploration. Motivated by the survival tactics of hawk-moths, ESRFA incorporates a hovering-driven attractiveness operation, an exploration-driven evading mechanism, and a learning scheme based on the historical best experience in the neighbourhood to further enhance SRFA. Standard and CEC2014 benchmark optimization functions are used for evaluation of the proposed FA-based models. The empirical results indicate that ESRFA, SRFA and RFA significantly outperform the original FA model, a number of state-of-the-art FA variants, and other swarm-based algorithms, which include Simulated Annealing, Cuckoo Search, Particle Swarm, Bat Swarm, Dragonfly, and Ant-Lion Optimization, in diverse challenging benchmark functions