Driving Active Contours to Concave Regions

Broken characters restoration represents the major challenge of optical character recognition (OCR). Active contours, which have been used successfully to restore ancient documents with high degradations have drawback in restoring characters with deep concavity boundaries. Deep concavity problem represents the main obstacle, which has prevented Gradient Vector Flow active contour in converge to objects with complex concavity boundaries. In this paper, we proposed a technique to enhance (GVF) active contour using particle swarm optimization (PSO) through directing snake points (snaxels) toward correct positions into deep concavity boundaries of broken characters by comparing with genetic algorithms as an optimization method. Our experimental results showed that particle swarm optimization outperform on genetic algorithm to correct capturing the converged areas and save spent time in optimization process

Applied Metaheuristic Computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

Applied Methuerstic computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

Object Boundary Detection Using Active Contour Model via Multiswarm PSO with Fuzzy-Rule Based Adaptation of Inertia Factor

Active contour models, colloquially known as snakes, are quite popular for several applications such as object boundary detection, image segmentation, object tracking, and classification via energy minimization. While energy minimization may be accomplished using traditional optimization methods, approaches based on nature-inspired evolutionary algorithms have been developed in recent years. One such evolutionary algorithm that has been used extensively in active contours is the particle swarm optimization (PSO). However, conventional PSO converges slowly and gets trapped in local minimum easily which results in inaccurate detection of concavities in the object boundary. This is taken care of by using proposed multiswarm PSO in which a swarm is set for every control point in the snake and then all the swarms search for their best points simultaneously through information sharing among them. The performance of the multiswarm PSO-based search process is further enhanced by using dynamic adaptation of the inertia factor. In this paper, we propose using a set of fuzzy rules to adjust the inertia weight on the basis of the current normalized snake energy and the current value of inertia. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to conventional approaches

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp