Margin maximizing discriminant analysis

Abstract. We propose a new feature extraction method called Margin Maximizing Discriminant Analysis (MMDA) which seeks to extract features suitable for classification tasks. MMDA is based on the principle that an ideal feature should convey the maximum information about the class labels and it should depend only on the geometry of the optimal decision boundary and not on those parts of the distribution of the input data that do not participate in shaping this boundary. Further, distinct feature components should convey unrelated information about the data. Two feature extraction methods are proposed for calculating the parameters of such a projection that are shown to yield equivalent results. The kernel mapping idea is used to derive non-linear versions. Experiments with several real-world, publicly available data sets demonstrate that the new method yields competitive results.

Biologically inspired feature extraction for rotation and scale tolerant pattern analysis

Biologically motivated information processing has been an important area of scientific research for decades. The central topic addressed in this dissertation is utilization of lateral inhibition and more generally, linear networks with recurrent connectivity along with complex-log conformal mapping in machine based implementations of information encoding, feature extraction and pattern recognition. The reasoning behind and method for spatially uniform implementation of inhibitory/excitatory network model in the framework of non-uniform log-polar transform is presented. For the space invariant connectivity model characterized by Topelitz-Block-Toeplitz matrix, the overall network response is obtained without matrix inverse operations providing the connection matrix generating function is bound by unity. It was shown that for the network with the inter-neuron connection function expandable in a Fourier series in polar angle, the overall network response is steerable. The decorrelating/whitening characteristics of networks with lateral inhibition are used in order to develop space invariant pre-whitening kernels specialized for specific category of input signals. These filters have extremely small memory footprint and are successfully utilized in order to improve performance of adaptive neural whitening algorithms. Finally, the method for feature extraction based on localized Independent Component Analysis (ICA) transform in log-polar domain and aided by previously developed pre-whitening filters is implemented. Since output codes produced by ICA are very sparse, a small number of non-zero coefficients was sufficient to encode input data and obtain reliable pattern recognition performance

Wavelet based approach for facial expression recognition

Facial expression recognition is one of the most active fields of research. Many facial expression recognition methods have been developed and implemented. Neural networks (NNs) have capability to undertake such pattern recognition tasks. The key factor of the use of NN is based on its characteristics. It is capable in conducting learning and generalizing, non-linear mapping, and parallel computation. Backpropagation neural networks (BPNNs) are the approach methods that mostly used. In this study, BPNNs were used as classifier to categorize facial expression images into seven-class of expressions which are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, neutral and surprise. For the purpose of feature extraction tasks, three discrete wavelet transforms were used to decompose images, namely Haar wavelet, Daubechies (4) wavelet and Coiflet (1) wavelet. To analyze the proposed method, a facial expression recognition system was built. The proposed method was tested on static images from JAFFE database

Quadratic Projection Based Feature Extraction with Its Application to Biometric Recognition

This paper presents a novel quadratic projection based feature extraction framework, where a set of quadratic matrices is learned to distinguish each class from all other classes. We formulate quadratic matrix learning (QML) as a standard semidefinite programming (SDP) problem. However, the con- ventional interior-point SDP solvers do not scale well to the problem of QML for high-dimensional data. To solve the scalability of QML, we develop an efficient algorithm, termed DualQML, based on the Lagrange duality theory, to extract nonlinear features. To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on biometric recognition. Experimental results on three representative biometric recogni- tion tasks, including face, palmprint, and ear recognition, demonstrate the superiority of the DualQML-based feature extraction algorithm compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm

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