Reference face graph for face recognition

Face recognition has been studied extensively; however, real-world face recognition still remains a challenging task. The demand for unconstrained practical face recognition is rising with the explosion of online multimedia such as social networks, and video surveillance footage where face analysis is of significant importance. In this paper, we approach face recognition in the context of graph theory. We recognize an unknown face using an external reference face graph (RFG). An RFG is generated and recognition of a given face is achieved by comparing it to the faces in the constructed RFG. Centrality measures are utilized to identify distinctive faces in the reference face graph. The proposed RFG-based face recognition algorithm is robust to the changes in pose and it is also alignment free. The RFG recognition is used in conjunction with DCT locality sensitive hashing for efficient retrieval to ensure scalability. Experiments are conducted on several publicly available databases and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods without any preprocessing necessities such as face alignment. Due to the richness in the reference set construction, the proposed method can also handle illumination and expression variation

Image Reconstruction from Bag-of-Visual-Words

The objective of this work is to reconstruct an original image from Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW). Image reconstruction from features can be a means of identifying the characteristics of features. Additionally, it enables us to generate novel images via features. Although BoVW is the de facto standard feature for image recognition and retrieval, successful image reconstruction from BoVW has not been reported yet. What complicates this task is that BoVW lacks the spatial information for including visual words. As described in this paper, to estimate an original arrangement, we propose an evaluation function that incorporates the naturalness of local adjacency and the global position, with a method to obtain related parameters using an external image database. To evaluate the performance of our method, we reconstruct images of objects of 101 kinds. Additionally, we apply our method to analyze object classifiers and to generate novel images via BoVW

Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]

No abstract available

Intelligent facial emotion recognition using moth-firefly optimization

In this research, we propose a facial expression recognition system with a variant of evolutionary firefly algorithm for feature optimization. First of all, a modified Local Binary Pattern descriptor is proposed to produce an initial discriminative face representation. A variant of the firefly algorithm is proposed to perform feature optimization. The proposed evolutionary firefly algorithm exploits the spiral search behaviour of moths and attractiveness search actions of fireflies to mitigate premature convergence of the Levy-flight firefly algorithm (LFA) and the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm. Specifically, it employs the logarithmic spiral search capability of the moths to increase local exploitation of the fireflies, whereas in comparison with the flames in MFO, the fireflies not only represent the best solutions identified by the moths but also act as the search agents guided by the attractiveness function to increase global exploration. Simulated Annealing embedded with Levy flights is also used to increase exploitation of the most promising solution. Diverse single and ensemble classifiers are implemented for the recognition of seven expressions. Evaluated with frontal-view images extracted from CK+, JAFFE, and MMI, and 45-degree multi-view and 90-degree side-view images from BU-3DFE and MMI, respectively, our system achieves a superior performance, and outperforms other state-of-the-art feature optimization methods and related facial expression recognition models by a significant margin

On the design of an ECOC-compliant genetic algorithm

Genetic Algorithms (GA) have been previously applied to Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in state-of-the-art works in order to find a suitable coding matrix. Nevertheless, none of the presented techniques directly take into account the properties of the ECOC matrix. As a result the considered search space is unnecessarily large. In this paper, a novel Genetic strategy to optimize the ECOC coding step is presented. This novel strategy redefines the usual crossover and mutation operators in order to take into account the theoretical properties of the ECOC framework. Thus, it reduces the search space and lets the algorithm to converge faster. In addition, a novel operator that is able to enlarge the code in a smart way is introduced. The novel methodology is tested on several UCI datasets and four challenging computer vision problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the results done in terms of performance, code length and number of Support Vectors shows that the optimization process is able to find very efficient codes, in terms of the trade-off between classification performance and the number of classifiers. Finally, classification performance per dichotomizer results shows that the novel proposal is able to obtain similar or even better results while defining a more compact number of dichotomies and SVs compared to state-of-the-art approaches

New Descriptor for Glomerulus Detection in Kidney Microscopy Image

Glomerulus detection is a key step in histopathological evaluation of microscopy images of kidneys. However, the task of automatic detection of glomeruli poses challenges due to the disparity in sizes and shapes of glomeruli in renal sections. Moreover, extensive variations of their intensities due to heterogeneity in immunohistochemistry staining are also encountered. Despite being widely recognized as a powerful descriptor for general object detection, the rectangular histogram of oriented gradients (Rectangular HOG) suffers from many false positives due to the aforementioned difficulties in the context of glomerulus detection. A new descriptor referred to as Segmental HOG is developed to perform a comprehensive detection of hundreds of glomeruli in images of whole kidney sections. The new descriptor possesses flexible blocks that can be adaptively fitted to input images to acquire robustness to deformations of glomeruli. Moreover, the novel segmentation technique employed herewith generates high quality segmentation outputs and the algorithm is assured to converge to an optimal solution. Consequently, experiments using real world image data reveal that Segmental HOG achieves significant improvements in detection performance compared to Rectangular HOG. The proposed descriptor and method for glomeruli detection present promising results and is expected to be useful in pathological evaluation