Good results on image classification and retrieval using support vector
machines (SVM) with local binary patterns (LBPs) as features have been
extensively reported in the literature where an entire image is retrieved or
classified. In contrast, in medical imaging, not all parts of the image may be
equally significant or relevant to the image retrieval application at hand. For
instance, in lung x-ray image, the lung region may contain a tumour, hence
being highly significant whereas the surrounding area does not contain
significant information from medical diagnosis perspective. In this paper, we
propose to detect salient regions of images during training and fold the data
to reduce the effect of irrelevant regions. As a result, smaller image areas
will be used for LBP features calculation and consequently classification by
SVM. We use IRMA 2009 dataset with 14,410 x-ray images to verify the
performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate the benefits of
saliency-based folding approach that delivers comparable classification
accuracies with state-of-the-art but exhibits lower computational cost and
storage requirements, factors highly important for big data analytics.Comment: To appear in proceedings of The 14th International Conference on
Machine Learning and Applications (IEEE ICMLA 2015), Miami, Florida, USA,
201