Intensity based image registration of satellite images using evolutionary techniques

Image registration is the fundamental image processing technique to determine geometrical transformation that gives the most accurate match between reference and floating images. Its main aim is to align two images. Satellite images to be fused for numerous applications must be registered before use. The main challenges in satellite image registration are finding out the optimum transformation parameters. Here in this work the non-alignment parameters are considered to be rigid and affine transformation. An intensity based satellite image registration technique is being used to register the floating image to the native co-ordinate system where the normalized mutual information (NMI) is taken as the similarity metric for optimizing and updating transform parameters. Because of no assumptions are made regarding the nature of the relationship between the image intensities in both modalities NMI is very general and powerful and can be applied automatically without prior segmentation on a large variety of data and as well works better for overlapped images as compared to mutual information(MI). In order to get maximum accuracy of registration the NMI is optimized using Genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization and hybrid GA-PSO. The random initialization and computational complexity makes GA oppressive, whereas weak local search ability with a premature convergence is the main drawback of PSO. Hybrid GA-PSO makes a trade-off between the local and global search in order to achieve a better balance between convergence speed and computational complexity. The above registration algorithm is being validated with several satellite data sets. The hybrid GA-PSO outperforms in terms of optimized NMI value and percentage of mis-registration error

Optimum Feature Selection for Recognizing Objects from Satellite Imagery Using Genetic Algorithm

Object recognition is a research area that aims to associate objects to categories or classes. Usually recognition of object specific geospatial features, as building, tree, mountains, roads, and rivers from high-resolution satellite imagery is a time consuming and expensive problem in the maintenance cycle of a Geographic Information System (GIS). Feature selection is the task of selecting a small subset from original features that can achieve maximum classification accuracy and reduce data dimensionality. This subset of features has some very important benefits like, it reduces computational complexity of learning algorithms, saves time, improve accuracy and the selected features can be insightful for the people involved in problem domain. This makes feature selection as an indispensable task in classification task. In our work, we propose wrapper approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) as an optimization algorithm to search the space of all possible subsets related to object geospatial features set for the purpose of recognition. GA is wrapped with three different classifier algorithms namely neural network, k-nearest neighbor and decision tree J48 as subset evaluating mechanism. The GA-ANN, GA-KNN and GA-J48 methods are implemented using the WEKA software on dataset that contains 38 extracted features from satellite images using ENVI software. The proposed wrapper approach incorporated the Correlation Ranking Filter (CRF) for spatial features to remove unimportant features. Results suggest that GA based neural classifiers and using CRF for spatial features are robust and effective in finding optimal subsets of features from large data sets

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

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

No abstract available

Semi-automated segment generation for geographic novelty detection using edge and area metrics

An approach to generating accurate image segments for land-cover mapping applications is to model the process as an optimisation problem. Area-based empirical discrepancy metrics are used to evaluate instances of generated segments in the search process. An edge metric, called the pixel correspondence metric (PCM), is evaluated in this approach as a fitness function for segmentation algorithm free-parameter tuning. The edge metric is able to converge to user-provided reference segments in an earth observation mapping problem when adequate training data are available. Two common metaheuristic search functions were tested, namely particle swarm optimisation (PSO) and differential evolution (DE). The edge metric is compared with an area-based metric, regarding classification results of the land-cover elements of interests for an arbitrary problem. The results show the potential of using edge metrics, as opposed to area metrics, for evaluating segments in an optimisation-based segmentation algorithm parameter-tuning approach

QuantiMus: A Machine Learning-Based Approach for High Precision Analysis of Skeletal Muscle Morphology.

Skeletal muscle injury provokes a regenerative response, characterized by the de novo generation of myofibers that are distinguished by central nucleation and re-expression of developmentally restricted genes. In addition to these characteristics, myofiber cross-sectional area (CSA) is widely used to evaluate muscle hypertrophic and regenerative responses. Here, we introduce QuantiMus, a free software program that uses machine learning algorithms to quantify muscle morphology and molecular features with high precision and quick processing-time. The ability of QuantiMus to define and measure myofibers was compared to manual measurement or other automated software programs. QuantiMus rapidly and accurately defined total myofibers and measured CSA with comparable performance but quantified the CSA of centrally-nucleated fibers (CNFs) with greater precision compared to other software. It additionally quantified the fluorescence intensity of individual myofibers of human and mouse muscle, which was used to assess the distribution of myofiber type, based on the myosin heavy chain isoform that was expressed. Furthermore, analysis of entire quadriceps cross-sections of healthy and mdx mice showed that dystrophic muscle had an increased frequency of Evans blue dye+ injured myofibers. QuantiMus also revealed that the proportion of centrally nucleated, regenerating myofibers that express embryonic myosin heavy chain (eMyHC) or neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM) were increased in dystrophic mice. Our findings reveal that QuantiMus has several advantages over existing software. The unique self-learning capacity of the machine learning algorithms provides superior accuracy and the ability to rapidly interrogate the complete muscle section. These qualities increase rigor and reproducibility by avoiding methods that rely on the sampling of representative areas of a section. This is of particular importance for the analysis of dystrophic muscle given the "patchy" distribution of muscle pathology. QuantiMus is an open source tool, allowing customization to meet investigator-specific needs and provides novel analytical approaches for quantifying muscle morphology

Multilevel Thresholding for Image Segmentation Using an Improved Electromagnetism Optimization Algorithm

Image segmentation is considered one of the most important tasks in image processing, which has several applications in different areas such as; industry agriculture, medicine, etc. In this paper, we develop the electromagnetic optimization (EMO) algorithm based on levy function, EMO-levy, to enhance the EMO performance for determining the optimal multi-level thresholding of image segmentation. In general, EMO simulates the mechanism of attraction and repulsion between charges to develop the individuals of a population. EMO takes random samples from search space within the histogram of image, where, each sample represents each particle in EMO. The quality of each particle is assessed based on Otsu’s or Kapur objective function value. The solutions are updated using EMO operators until determine the optimal objective functions. Finally, this approach produces segmented images with optimal values for the threshold and a few number of iterations. The proposed technique is validated using different standard test images. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm for image segmentation compared with well-known optimization methods