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 robust nonlinear scale space change detection approach for SAR images

In this paper, we propose a change detection approach based on nonlinear scale space analysis of change images for robust detection of various changes incurred by natural phenomena and/or human activities in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images using Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs). To achieve this, a variant of the log-ratio image of multitemporal images is calculated which is followed by Feature Preserving Despeckling (FPD) to generate nonlinear scale space images exhibiting different trade-offs in terms of speckle reduction and shape detail preservation. MSERs of each scale space image are found and then combined through a decision level fusion strategy, namely "selective scale fusion" (SSF), where contrast and boundary curvature of each MSER are considered. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using real multitemporal high resolution TerraSAR-X images and synthetically generated multitemporal images composed of shapes with several orientations, sizes, and backscatter amplitude levels representing a variety of possible signatures of change. One of the main outcomes of this approach is that different objects having different sizes and levels of contrast with their surroundings appear as stable regions at different scale space images thus the fusion of results from scale space images yields a good overall performance

Accelerated genetic algorithm based on search-space decomposition for change detection in remote sensing images

Detecting change areas among two or more remote sensing images is a key technique in remote sensing. It usually consists of generating and analyzing a difference image thus to produce a change map. Analyzing the difference image to obtain the change map is essentially a binary classification problem, and can be solved by optimization algorithms. This paper proposes an accelerated genetic algorithm based on search-space decomposition (SD-aGA) for change detection in remote sensing images. Firstly, the BM3D algorithm is used to preprocess the remote sensing image to enhance useful information and suppress noises. The difference image is then obtained using the logarithmic ratio method. Secondly, after saliency detection, fuzzy c-means algorithm is conducted on the salient region detected in the difference image to identify the changed, unchanged and undetermined pixels. Only those undetermined pixels are considered by the optimization algorithm, which reduces the search space significantly. Inspired by the idea of the divide-and-conquer strategy, the difference image is decomposed into sub-blocks with a method similar to down-sampling, where only those undetermined pixels are analyzed and optimized by SD-aGA in parallel. The category labels of the undetermined pixels in each sub-block are optimized according to an improved objective function with neighborhood information. Finally the decision results of the category labels of all the pixels in the sub-blocks are remapped to their original positions in the difference image and then merged globally. Decision fusion is conducted on each pixel based on the decision results in the local neighborhood to produce the final change map. The proposed method is tested on six diverse remote sensing image benchmark datasets and compared against six state-of-the-art methods. Segmentations on the synthetic image and natural image corrupted by different noise are also carried out for comparison. Results demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed SD-aGA on handling noises and detecting the changed areas accurately. In particular, compared with the traditional genetic algorithm, SD-aGA can obtain a much higher degree of detection accuracy with much less computational time

Fuzzy clustering of univariate and multivariate time series by genetic multiobjective optimization

COMISEF Working Papers Series WPS-028 08/02/2010 URL: http://comisef.eu/files/wps028.pd

A novel unsupervised Levy flight particle swarm optimization (ULPSO) method for multispectral remote-sensing image classification

The rapid development of earth observation technology has produced large quantities of remote-sensing data. Unsupervised classification (i.e. clustering) of remote-sensing images, an important means to acquire land-use/cover information, has become increasingly in demand due to its simplicity and ease of application. Traditional methods, such as k-means, struggle to solve this NP-hard (Non-deterministic Polynomial hard) image classification problem. Particle swarm optimization (PSO), always achieving better result than k-means, has recently been applied to unsupervised image classification. However, PSO was also found to be easily trapped on local optima. This article proposes a novel unsupervised Levy flight particle swarm optimization (ULPSO) method for image classification with balanced exploitation and exploration capabilities. It benefits from a new searching strategy: the worst particle in the swarm is targeted and its position is updated with Levy flight at each iteration. The effectiveness of the proposed method was tested with three types of remote-sensing imagery (Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), Flightline C1 (FLC), and QuickBird) that are distinct in terms of spatial and spectral resolution and landscape. Our results showed that ULPSO is able to achieve significantly better and more stable classification results than k-means and the other two intelligent methods based on genetic algorithm (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) over all of the experiments. ULPSO is, therefore, recommended as an effective alternative for unsupervised remote-sensing image classification

Performance Evaluation of Cluster Validity Indices (CVIs) on Multi/Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Datasets

The number of clusters (i.e., the number of classes) for unsupervised classification has been recognized as an important part of remote sensing image clustering analysis. The number of classes is usually determined by cluster validity indices (CVIs). Although many CVIs have been proposed, few studies have compared and evaluated their effectiveness on remote sensing datasets. In this paper, the performance of 16 representative and commonly-used CVIs was comprehensively tested by applying the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm to cluster nine types of remote sensing datasets, including multispectral (QuickBird, Landsat TM, Landsat ETM+, FLC1, and GaoFen-1) and hyperspectral datasets (Hyperion, HYDICE, ROSIS, and AVIRIS). The preliminary experimental results showed that most CVIs, including the commonly used DBI (Davies-Bouldin index) and XBI (Xie-Beni index), were not suitable for remote sensing images (especially for hyperspectral images) due to significant between-cluster overlaps; the only effective index for both multispectral and hyperspectral data sets was the WSJ index (WSJI). Such important conclusions can serve as a guideline for future remote sensing image clustering applications

Multi-Objective Differential Evolution for Automatic Clustering with Application to Micro-Array Data Analysis

This paper applies the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to the task of automatic fuzzy clustering in a Multi-objective Optimization (MO) framework. It compares the performances of two multi-objective variants of DE over the fuzzy clustering problem, where two conflicting fuzzy validity indices are simultaneously optimized. The resultant Pareto optimal set of solutions from each algorithm consists of a number of non-dominated solutions, from which the user can choose the most promising ones according to the problem specifications. A real-coded representation of the search variables, accommodating variable number of cluster centers, is used for DE. The performances of the multi-objective DE-variants have also been contrasted to that of two most well-known schemes of MO clustering, namely the Non Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA II) and Multi-Objective Clustering with an unknown number of Clusters K (MOCK). Experimental results using six artificial and four real life datasets of varying range of complexities indicate that DE holds immense promise as a candidate algorithm for devising MO clustering schemes

Multiobjective evolutionary optimization of quadratic Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy rules for remote bathymetry estimation

In this work we tackle the problem of bathymetry estimation using: i) a multispectral optical image of the region of interest, and ii) a set of in situ measurements. The idea is to learn the relation that between the reflectances and the depth using a supervised learning approach. In particular, quadratic Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy rules are used to model this relation. The rule base is optimized by means of a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. To the best of our knowledge this work represents the first use of a quadratic Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system optimized by a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with bounded complexity, i.e., able to control the complexity of the consequent part of second-order fuzzy rules. This model has an outstanding modeling power, without inheriting the drawback of complexity due to the use of quadratic functions (which have complexity that scales quadratically with the number of inputs). This opens the way to the use of the proposed approach even for medium/high dimensional problems, like in the case of hyper-spectral images

Multi-Class Clustering of Cancer Subtypes through SVM Based Ensemble of Pareto-Optimal Solutions for Gene Marker Identification

With the advancement of microarray technology, it is now possible to study the expression profiles of thousands of genes across different experimental conditions or tissue samples simultaneously. Microarray cancer datasets, organized as samples versus genes fashion, are being used for classification of tissue samples into benign and malignant or their subtypes. They are also useful for identifying potential gene markers for each cancer subtype, which helps in successful diagnosis of particular cancer types. In this article, we have presented an unsupervised cancer classification technique based on multiobjective genetic clustering of the tissue samples. In this regard, a real-coded encoding of the cluster centers is used and cluster compactness and separation are simultaneously optimized. The resultant set of near-Pareto-optimal solutions contains a number of non-dominated solutions. A novel approach to combine the clustering information possessed by the non-dominated solutions through Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier has been proposed. Final clustering is obtained by consensus among the clusterings yielded by different kernel functions. The performance of the proposed multiobjective clustering method has been compared with that of several other microarray clustering algorithms for three publicly available benchmark cancer datasets. Moreover, statistical significance tests have been conducted to establish the statistical superiority of the proposed clustering method. Furthermore, relevant gene markers have been identified using the clustering result produced by the proposed clustering method and demonstrated visually. Biological relationships among the gene markers are also studied based on gene ontology. The results obtained are found to be promising and can possibly have important impact in the area of unsupervised cancer classification as well as gene marker identification for multiple cancer subtypes