Application of biosignal-driven intelligent systems for multifunction prosthesis control

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Prosthetic devices aim to provide an artificial alternative to missing limbs. The controller for such devices is usually driven by the biosignals generated by the human body, particularly Electromyogram (EMG) or Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Such a controller utilizes a pattern recognition approach to classify the EMG signal recorded from the human muscles or the EEG signal from the brain. The aim of this thesis is to improve the EMG and EEG pattern classification accuracy. Due to the fact that the success of pattern recognition based biosignal driven systems highly depends on the quality of extracted features, a number of novel, robust, hybrid and innovative methods are proposed to achieve better performance. These methods are developed to effectively tackle many of the limitations of existing systems, in particular feature representation and dimensionality reduction. A set of knowledge extraction methods that can accurately and rapidly identify the most important attributes for classifying the arm movements are formulated. This is accomplished through the following: 1. Developing a new feature extraction technique that can identify the most important features from the high-dimensional time-frequency representation of the multichannel EMG and EEG signals. For this task, an information content estimation method using fuzzy entropies and fuzzy mutual information is proposed to identify the optimal wravelet packet transform decomposition for classification. 2. Developing a powerful variable (feature or channel) selection paradigm to improve the performance of multi-channel EMG and EEG driven systems. This will eventually lead to the development of a combined channel and feature selection technique as one possible scheme for dimensionality reduction. Two novel feature selection methods are developed under this scheme utilizing the ant colony arid differential evolution optimization techniques. The differential evolution optimization technique is further modified in a novel attempt in employing a float optimizer for the combinatorial task of feature selection, proving powerful performance by both methods. 3. Developing two feature projection techniques that extract a small subset of highly informative discriminant features, thus acting as an alternative scheme for dimensionality reduction. The two methods represent novel variations to fuzzy discriminant analysis based projection techniques. In addition, an extension to the non-linear discriminant analysis is proposed based on a mixture of differential evolution and fuzzy discriminant analysis. The testing and verification process of the proposed methods on different EMG and EEG datasets provides very encouraging results

A generic optimising feature extraction method using multiobjective genetic programming

In this paper, we present a generic, optimising feature extraction method using multiobjective genetic programming. We re-examine the feature extraction problem and show that effective feature extraction can significantly enhance the performance of pattern recognition systems with simple classifiers. A framework is presented to evolve optimised feature extractors that transform an input pattern space into a decision space in which maximal class separability is obtained. We have applied this method to real world datasets from the UCI Machine Learning and StatLog databases to verify our approach and compare our proposed method with other reported results. We conclude that our algorithm is able to produce classifiers of superior (or equivalent) performance to the conventional classifiers examined, suggesting removal of the need to exhaustively evaluate a large family of conventional classifiers on any new problem. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Pattern recognition using genetic programming for classification of diabetes and modulation data

The field of science whose goal is to assign each input object to one of the given set of categories is called pattern recognition. A standard pattern recognition system can be divided into two main components, feature extraction and pattern classification. During the process of feature extraction, the information relevant to the problem is extracted from raw data, prepared as features and passed to a classifier for assignment of a label. Generally, the extracted feature vector has fairly large number of dimensions, from the order of hundreds to thousands, increasing the computational complexity significantly. Feature generation is introduced to handle this problem which filters out the unwanted features. The functionality of feature generation has become very important in modern pattern recognition systems as it not only reduces the dimensions of the data but also increases the classification accuracy. A genetic programming (GP) based framework has been utilised in this thesis for feature generation. GP is a process based on the biological evolution of features in which combination of original features are evolved. The stronger features propagate in this evolution while weaker features are discarded. The process of evolution is optimised in a way to improve the discriminatory power of features in every new generation. The final features generated have more discriminatory power than the original features, making the job of classifier easier. One of the main problems in GP is a tendency towards suboptimal-convergence. In this thesis, the response of features for each input instance which gives insight into strengths and weaknesses of features is used to avoid suboptimal-convergence. The strengths and weaknesses are utilised to find the right partners during crossover operation which not only helps to avoid suboptimal-convergence but also makes the evolution more effective. In order to thoroughly examine the capabilities of GP for feature generation and to cover different scenarios, different combinations of GP are designed. Each combination of GP differs in the way, the capability of the features to solve the problem (the fitness function) is evaluated. In this research Fisher criterion, Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Network have been used to evaluate the fitness function for binary classification problems while K-nearest neighbour classifier has been used for fitness evaluation of multi-class classification problems. Two Real world classification problems (diabetes detection and modulation classification) are used to evaluate the performance of GP for feature generation. These two problems belong to two different categories; diabetes detection is a binary classification problem while modulation classification is a multi-class classification problem. The application of GP for both the problems helps to evaluate the performance of GP for both categories. A series of experiments are conducted to evaluate and compare the results obtained using GP. The results demonstrate the superiority of GP generated features compared to features generated by conventional methods

Application of multiobjective genetic programming to the design of robot failure recognition systems

We present an evolutionary approach using multiobjective genetic programming (MOGP) to derive optimal feature extraction preprocessing stages for robot failure detection. This data-driven machine learning method is compared both with conventional (nonevolutionary) classifiers and a set of domain-dependent feature extraction methods. We conclude MOGP is an effective and practical design method for failure recognition systems with enhanced recognition accuracy over conventional classifiers, independent of domain knowledge

Handwritten Character Recognition of South Indian Scripts: A Review

Handwritten character recognition is always a frontier area of research in the field of pattern recognition and image processing and there is a large demand for OCR on hand written documents. Even though, sufficient studies have performed in foreign scripts like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters, only a very few work can be traced for handwritten character recognition of Indian scripts especially for the South Indian scripts. This paper provides an overview of offline handwritten character recognition in South Indian Scripts, namely Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telungu.Comment: Paper presented on the "National Conference on Indian Language Computing", Kochi, February 19-20, 2011. 6 pages, 5 figure