5,152 research outputs found
An Overview of Classifier Fusion Methods
A number of classifier fusion methods have been
recently developed opening an alternative approach
leading to a potential improvement in the
classification performance. As there is little theory of
information fusion itself, currently we are faced with
different methods designed for different problems and
producing different results. This paper gives an
overview of classifier fusion methods and attempts to
identify new trends that may dominate this area of
research in future. A taxonomy of fusion methods
trying to bring some order into the existing “pudding
of diversities” is also provided
An Overview of Classifier Fusion Methods
A number of classifier fusion methods have been
recently developed opening an alternative approach
leading to a potential improvement in the
classification performance. As there is little theory of
information fusion itself, currently we are faced with
different methods designed for different problems and
producing different results. This paper gives an
overview of classifier fusion methods and attempts to
identify new trends that may dominate this area of
research in future. A taxonomy of fusion methods
trying to bring some order into the existing “pudding
of diversities” is also provided
Designing fuzzy rule based classifier using self-organizing feature map for analysis of multispectral satellite images
We propose a novel scheme for designing fuzzy rule based classifier. An SOFM
based method is used for generating a set of prototypes which is used to
generate a set of fuzzy rules. Each rule represents a region in the feature
space that we call the context of the rule. The rules are tuned with respect to
their context. We justified that the reasoning scheme may be different in
different context leading to context sensitive inferencing. To realize context
sensitive inferencing we used a softmin operator with a tunable parameter. The
proposed scheme is tested on several multispectral satellite image data sets
and the performance is found to be much better than the results reported in the
literature.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure
Land cover classification using fuzzy rules and aggregation of contextual information through evidence theory
Land cover classification using multispectral satellite image is a very
challenging task with numerous practical applications. We propose a multi-stage
classifier that involves fuzzy rule extraction from the training data and then
generation of a possibilistic label vector for each pixel using the fuzzy rule
base. To exploit the spatial correlation of land cover types we propose four
different information aggregation methods which use the possibilistic class
label of a pixel and those of its eight spatial neighbors for making the final
classification decision. Three of the aggregation methods use Dempster-Shafer
theory of evidence while the remaining one is modeled after the fuzzy k-NN
rule. The proposed methods are tested with two benchmark seven channel
satellite images and the results are found to be quite satisfactory. They are
also compared with a Markov random field (MRF) model-based contextual
classification method and found to perform consistently better.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure
A generic framework for context-dependent fusion with application to landmine detection.
For complex detection and classification problems, involving data with large intra-class variations and noisy inputs, no single source of information can provide a satisfactory solution. As a result, combination of multiple classifiers is playing an increasing role in solving these complex pattern recognition problems, and has proven to be a viable alternative to using a single classifier. Over the past few years, a variety of schemes have been proposed for combining multiple classifiers. Most of these were global as they assign a degree of worthiness to each classifier, that is averaged over the entire training data. This may not be the optimal way to combine the different experts since the behavior of each one may not be uniform over the different regions of the feature space. To overcome this issue, few local methods have been proposed in the last few years. Local fusion methods aim to adapt the classifiers\u27 worthiness to different regions of the feature space. First, they partition the input samples. Then, they identify the best classifier for each partition and designate it as the expert for that partition. Unfortunately, current local methods are either computationally expensive and/or perform these two tasks independently of each other. However, feature space partition and algorithm selection are not independent and their optimization should be simultaneous. In this dissertation, we introduce a new local fusion approach, called Context Extraction for Local Fusion (CELF). CELF was designed to adapt the fusion to different regions of the feature space. It takes advantage of the strength of the different experts and overcome their limitations. First, we describe the baseline CELF algorithm. We formulate a novel objective function that combines context identification and multi-algorithm fusion criteria into a joint objective function. The context identification component thrives to partition the input feature space into different clusters (called contexts), while the fusion component thrives to learn the optimal fusion parameters within each cluster. Second, we propose several variations of CELF to deal with different applications scenario. In particular, we propose an extension that includes a feature discrimination component (CELF-FD). This version is advantageous when dealing with high dimensional feature spaces and/or when the number of features extracted by the individual algorithms varies significantly. CELF-CA is another extension of CELF that adds a regularization term to the objective function to introduce competition among the clusters and to find the optimal number of clusters in an unsupervised way. CELF-CA starts by partitioning the data into a large number of small clusters. As the algorithm progresses, adjacent clusters compete for data points, and clusters that lose the competition gradually become depleted and vanish. Third, we propose CELF-M that generalizes CELF to support multiple classes data sets. The baseline CELF and its extensions were formulated to use linear aggregation to combine the output of the different algorithms within each context. For some applications, this can be too restrictive and non-linear fusion may be needed. To address this potential drawback, we propose two other variations of CELF that use non-linear aggregation. The first one is based on Neural Networks (CELF-NN) and the second one is based on Fuzzy Integrals (CELF-FI). The latter one has the desirable property of assigning weights to subsets of classifiers to take into account the interaction between them. To test a new signature using CELF (or its variants), each algorithm would extract its set of features and assigns a confidence value. Then, the features are used to identify the best context, and the fusion parameters of this context are used to fuse the individual confidence values. For each variation of CELF, we formulate an objective function, derive the necessary conditions to optimize it, and construct an iterative algorithm. Then we use examples to illustrate the behavior of the algorithm, compare it to global fusion, and highlight its advantages. We apply our proposed fusion methods to the problem of landmine detection. We use data collected using Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) and Wideband Electro -Magnetic Induction (WEMI) sensors. We show that CELF (and its variants) can identify meaningful and coherent contexts (e.g. mines of same type, mines buried at the same site, etc.) and that different expert algorithms can be identified for the different contexts. In addition to the land mine detection application, we apply our approaches to semantic video indexing, image database categorization, and phoneme recognition. In all applications, we compare the performance of CELF with standard fusion methods, and show that our approach outperforms all these methods
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