Color image segmentation using saturated RGB colors and decoupling the intensity from the hue

Although the RGB space is accepted to represent colors, it is not adequate for color processing. In related works the colors are usually mapped to other color spaces more suitable for color processing, but it may imply an important computational load because of the non-linear operations involved to map the colors between spaces; nevertheless, it is common to find in the state-of-the-art works using the RGB space. In this paper we introduce an approach for color image segmentation, using the RGB space to represent and process colors; where the chromaticity and the intensity are processed separately, mimicking the human perception of color, reducing the underlying sensitiveness to intensity of the RGB space. We show the hue of colors can be processed by training a self-organizing map with chromaticity samples of the most saturated colors, where the training set is small but very representative; once the neural network is trained it can be employed to process any given image without training it again. We create an intensity channel by extracting the magnitudes of the color vectors; by using the Otsu method, we compute the threshold values to divide the intensity range in three classes. We perform experiments with the Berkeley segmentation database; in order to show the benefits of our proposal, we perform experiments with a neural network trained with different colors by subsampling the RGB space, where the chromaticity and the intensity are processed jointly. We evaluate and compare quantitatively the segmented images obtained with both approaches. We claim to obtain competitive results with respect to related works

Data mining using intelligent systems : an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree approach

Data mining can be said to have the aim to analyze the observational datasets to find relationships and to present the data in ways that are both understandable and useful. In this thesis, some existing intelligent systems techniques such as Self-Organizing Map, Fuzzy C-means and decision tree are used to analyze several datasets. The techniques are used to provide flexible information processing capability for handling real-life situations. This thesis is concerned with the design, implementation, testing and application of these techniques to those datasets. The thesis also introduces a hybrid intelligent systems technique: Optimized Weighted Fuzzy Decision Tree (OWFDT) with the aim of improving Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDT) and solving practical problems. This thesis first proposes an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree, incorporating the introduction of Fuzzy C-Means to fuzzify the input instances but keeping the expected labels crisp. This leads to a different output layer activation function and weight connection in the neural network (NN) structure obtained by mapping the FDT to the NN. A momentum term was also introduced into the learning process to train the weight connections to avoid oscillation or divergence. A new reasoning mechanism has been also proposed to combine the constructed tree with those weights which had been optimized in the learning process. This thesis also makes a comparison between the OWFDT and two benchmark algorithms, Fuzzy ID3 and weighted FDT. SIx datasets ranging from material science to medical and civil engineering were introduced as case study applications. These datasets involve classification of composite material failure mechanism, classification of electrocorticography (ECoG)/Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, eye bacteria prediction and wave overtopping prediction. Different intelligent systems techniques were used to cluster the patterns and predict the classes although OWFDT was used to design classifiers for all the datasets. In the material dataset, Self-Organizing Map and Fuzzy C-Means were used to cluster the acoustic event signals and classify those events to different failure mechanism, after the classification, OWFDT was introduced to design a classifier in an attempt to classify acoustic event signals. For the eye bacteria dataset, we use the bagging technique to improve the classification accuracy of Multilayer Perceptrons and Decision Trees. Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) to Decision Tree also helped to select those most important sensors (features) so that the dimension of the data could be reduced. Those features which were most important were used to grow the OWFDT and the curse of dimensionality problem could be solved using this approach. The last dataset, which is concerned with wave overtopping, was used to benchmark OWFDT with some other Intelligent Systems techniques, such as Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), Genetic Neural Mathematical Method (GNMM) and Fuzzy ARTMAP. Through analyzing these datasets using these Intelligent Systems Techniques, it has been shown that patterns and classes can be found or can be classified through combining those techniques together. OWFDT has also demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness as compared with a conventional fuzzy Decision Tree and weighted fuzzy Decision Tree

Data mining using intelligent systems : an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree approach

Data mining can be said to have the aim to analyze the observational datasets to find relationships and to present the data in ways that are both understandable and useful. In this thesis, some existing intelligent systems techniques such as Self-Organizing Map, Fuzzy C-means and decision tree are used to analyze several datasets. The techniques are used to provide flexible information processing capability for handling real-life situations. This thesis is concerned with the design, implementation, testing and application of these techniques to those datasets. The thesis also introduces a hybrid intelligent systems technique: Optimized Weighted Fuzzy Decision Tree (OWFDT) with the aim of improving Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDT) and solving practical problems. This thesis first proposes an optimized weighted fuzzy decision tree, incorporating the introduction of Fuzzy C-Means to fuzzify the input instances but keeping the expected labels crisp. This leads to a different output layer activation function and weight connection in the neural network (NN) structure obtained by mapping the FDT to the NN. A momentum term was also introduced into the learning process to train the weight connections to avoid oscillation or divergence. A new reasoning mechanism has been also proposed to combine the constructed tree with those weights which had been optimized in the learning process. This thesis also makes a comparison between the OWFDT and two benchmark algorithms, Fuzzy ID3 and weighted FDT. SIx datasets ranging from material science to medical and civil engineering were introduced as case study applications. These datasets involve classification of composite material failure mechanism, classification of electrocorticography (ECoG)/Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, eye bacteria prediction and wave overtopping prediction. Different intelligent systems techniques were used to cluster the patterns and predict the classes although OWFDT was used to design classifiers for all the datasets. In the material dataset, Self-Organizing Map and Fuzzy C-Means were used to cluster the acoustic event signals and classify those events to different failure mechanism, after the classification, OWFDT was introduced to design a classifier in an attempt to classify acoustic event signals. For the eye bacteria dataset, we use the bagging technique to improve the classification accuracy of Multilayer Perceptrons and Decision Trees. Bootstrap aggregating (bagging) to Decision Tree also helped to select those most important sensors (features) so that the dimension of the data could be reduced. Those features which were most important were used to grow the OWFDT and the curse of dimensionality problem could be solved using this approach. The last dataset, which is concerned with wave overtopping, was used to benchmark OWFDT with some other Intelligent Systems techniques, such as Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), Genetic Neural Mathematical Method (GNMM) and Fuzzy ARTMAP. Through analyzing these datasets using these Intelligent Systems Techniques, it has been shown that patterns and classes can be found or can be classified through combining those techniques together. OWFDT has also demonstrated its efficiency and effectiveness as compared with a conventional fuzzy Decision Tree and weighted fuzzy Decision Tree.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceUniversity of WarwickOverseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS)GBUnited Kingdo

Pattern Recognition

A wealth of advanced pattern recognition algorithms are emerging from the interdiscipline between technologies of effective visual features and the human-brain cognition process. Effective visual features are made possible through the rapid developments in appropriate sensor equipments, novel filter designs, and viable information processing architectures. While the understanding of human-brain cognition process broadens the way in which the computer can perform pattern recognition tasks. The present book is intended to collect representative researches around the globe focusing on low-level vision, filter design, features and image descriptors, data mining and analysis, and biologically inspired algorithms. The 27 chapters coved in this book disclose recent advances and new ideas in promoting the techniques, technology and applications of pattern recognition

Wind turbine power output short-term forecast : a comparative study of data clustering techniques in a PSO-ANFIS model

Abstract:The emergence of new sites for wind energy exploration in South Africa requires an accurate prediction of the potential power output of a typical utility-scale wind turbine in such areas. However, careful selection of data clustering technique is very essential as it has a significant impact on the accuracy of the prediction. Adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS), both in its standalone and hybrid form has been applied in offline and online forecast in wind energy studies, however, the effect of clustering techniques has not been reported despite its significance. Therefore, this study investigates the effect of the choice of clustering algorithm on the performance of a standalone ANFIS and ANFIS optimized with particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique using a synthetic wind turbine power output data of a potential site in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. In this study a wind resource map for the Eastern Cape province was developed. Also, autoregressive ANFIS models and their hybrids with PSO were developed. Each model was evaluated based on three clustering techniques (grid partitioning (GP), subtractive clustering (SC), and fuzzy-c-means (FCM)). The gross wind power of the model wind turbine was estimated from the wind speed data collected from the potential site at 10 min data resolution using Windographer software. The standalone and hybrid models were trained and tested with 70% and 30% of the dataset respectively. The performance of each clustering technique was compared for both standalone and PSO-ANFIS models using known statistical metrics. From our findings, ANFIS standalone model clustered with SC performed best among the standalone models with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.132, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 30.94, a mean absolute deviation (MAD) of 0.077, relative mean bias error (rMBE) of 0.190 and variance accounted for (VAF) of 94.307. Also, PSO-ANFIS model clustered with SC technique performed the best among the three hybrid models with RMSE of 0.127, MAPE of 28.11, MAD of 0.078, rMBE of 0.190 and VAF of 94.311. The ANFIS-SC model recorded the lowest computational time of 30.23secs among the standalone models. However, the PSO-ANFIS-SC model recorded a computational time of 47.21secs. Based on our findings, a hybrid ANFIS model gives better forecast accuracy compared to the standalone model, though with a trade-off in the computational time. Since, the choice of clustering technique was observed to play a vital role in the forecast accuracy of standalone and hybrid models, this study recommends SC technique for ANFIS modeling at both standalone and hybrid models

Fuzzy transfer learning in human activity recognition.

Assisted living environments are incorporated with different technological solutions to improve the quality of life and well-being. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the research community on how to develop evolving solutions to aid assisted living. Different techniques have been studied to address the need for technological systems which are intelligent enough to evolve their knowledge to solve tasks which have not been previously encountered. One such approach is Transfer Learning (TL), for example, between humans and robots. Humans excel at dealing with everyday activities, learning and adapting to different activities. This comprises different complex techniques which enable the lifelong learning process from observation of our environment. To obtain similar learning in assistive agents, TL is needed. The aim of the research reported in this thesis is to address the challenge associated with learning and reuse of knowledge by assistive agents in an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environment. In this thesis, a novel approach to transfer learning of human activities through the combination of three methods; TL, Fuzzy Systems (FS) and Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is presented. Through the incorporation of FS into the proposed approach, uncertainty that is evident in the dynamic nature of human activities are embedded into the learning model. This research is focused on applications in assistive robotics. This is with a purpose of enabling assistive robots in AAL environments to acquire knowledge of such activities as are performed by humans. To achieve this, an extensive investigation into existing learning methods applied in human activities is conducted. The investigation encompasses current state-of-the-art of TL approaches employed in skill transfer across different but contextually related activities. To address the research questions identified in the thesis, the contributions of the methodology employed are in three main categories; 1) Firstly, a novel framework for human activity learning from information observed. Experiments are conducted on selected human activities to acquire enough information for building the framework. From the acquired information, relevant features extracted are used in a learning model to recognise different activities. 2) Secondly, the sequence of occurrence(s) of tasks in an activity needs to be considered in the learning process. Therefore, in this research, a novel technique for adaptive learning of activity sequences from acquired information is developed. 3) Finally, from the sequence obtained, a novel technique for transfer of human activity across heterogeneous feature space existing between a human and an assistive robot is developed. These categories form the basis of the TL framework modelled in this research. The framework proposed is applied to TL of human activity from data generated experimentally and benchmark datasets of various classes of human activities. The results presented in this thesis show that exploring the process of human activity learning is an important aspect in the TL framework. The features extracted sufficiently distinguish relevant patterns for each activity. Also, the results demonstrate the ability of the methodology to learn and predict human actions with a high degree of certainty. This encourages the use of TL in assisted living environments and other applications. This and many more applications of TL in technology would be a potential driver of the next revolution in artificial intelligence