Shape from Shading through Shape Evolution

In this paper, we address the shape-from-shading problem by training deep networks with synthetic images. Unlike conventional approaches that combine deep learning and synthetic imagery, we propose an approach that does not need any external shape dataset to render synthetic images. Our approach consists of two synergistic processes: the evolution of complex shapes from simple primitives, and the training of a deep network for shape-from-shading. The evolution generates better shapes guided by the network training, while the training improves by using the evolved shapes. We show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a shape-from-shading benchmark

Genetic Programming for Object Detection : a Two-Phase Approach with an Improved Fitness Function

This paper describes two innovations that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a genetic programming approach to object detection problems. The approach uses genetic programming to construct object detection programs that are applied, in a moving window fashion, to the large images to locate the objects of interest. The first innovation is to break the GP search into two phases with the first phase applied to a selected subset of the training data, and a simplified fitness function. The second phase is initialised with the programs from the first phase, and uses the full set of training data with a complete fitness function to construct the final detection programs. The second innovation is to add a program size component to the fitness function. This approach is examined and compared with a neural network approach on three object detection problems of increasing difficulty. The results suggest that the innovations increase both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the genetic programming search, and also that the genetic programming approach outperforms a neural network approach for the most difficult data set in terms of the object detection accuracy

An Overview of the Use of Neural Networks for Data Mining Tasks

In the recent years the area of data mining has experienced a considerable demand for technologies that extract knowledge from large and complex data sources. There is a substantial commercial interest as well as research investigations in the area that aim to develop new and improved approaches for extracting information, relationships, and patterns from datasets. Artificial Neural Networks (NN) are popular biologically inspired intelligent methodologies, whose classification, prediction and pattern recognition capabilities have been utilised successfully in many areas, including science, engineering, medicine, business, banking, telecommunication, and many other fields. This paper highlights from a data mining perspective the implementation of NN, using supervised and unsupervised learning, for pattern recognition, classification, prediction and cluster analysis, and focuses the discussion on their usage in bioinformatics and financial data analysis tasks

Improved fully convolutional network with conditional random field for building extraction

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesBuilding extraction from remotely sensed imagery plays an important role in urban planning, disaster management, navigation, updating geographic databases and several other geospatial applications. Several published contributions are dedicated to the applications of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) for building extraction using aerial/satellite imagery exists; however, in all these contributions a good accuracy is always paid at the price of extremely complex and large network architectures. In this paper, we present an enhanced Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) framework especially molded for building extraction of remotely sensed images by applying Conditional Random Field (CRF). The main purpose here is to propose a framework which balances maximum accuracy with less network complexity. The modern activation function called Exponential Linear Unit (ELU) is applied to improve the performance of the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), resulting in more, yet accurate building prediction. To further reduce the noise (false classified buildings) and to sharpen the boundary of the buildings, a post processing CRF is added at the end of the adopted Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework. The experiments were conducted on Massachusetts building aerial imagery. The results show that our proposed framework outperformed FCN baseline, which is the existing baseline framework for semantic segmentation, in term of performance measure, the F1-score and Intersection Over Union (IoU) measure. Additionally, the proposed method stood superior to the pre-existing classifier for building extraction using the same dataset in terms of performance measure and network complexity at once

Metaheuristic design of feedforward neural networks: a review of two decades of research

Over the past two decades, the feedforward neural network (FNN) optimization has been a key interest among the researchers and practitioners of multiple disciplines. The FNN optimization is often viewed from the various perspectives: the optimization of weights, network architecture, activation nodes, learning parameters, learning environment, etc. Researchers adopted such different viewpoints mainly to improve the FNN's generalization ability. The gradient-descent algorithm such as backpropagation has been widely applied to optimize the FNNs. Its success is evident from the FNN's application to numerous real-world problems. However, due to the limitations of the gradient-based optimization methods, the metaheuristic algorithms including the evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, etc., are still being widely explored by the researchers aiming to obtain generalized FNN for a given problem. This article attempts to summarize a broad spectrum of FNN optimization methodologies including conventional and metaheuristic approaches. This article also tries to connect various research directions emerged out of the FNN optimization practices, such as evolving neural network (NN), cooperative coevolution NN, complex-valued NN, deep learning, extreme learning machine, quantum NN, etc. Additionally, it provides interesting research challenges for future research to cope-up with the present information processing era