Fuzzy Windows with Gaussian Processed Labels for Ordinal Image Scoring Tasks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a Fuzzy Window with the Gaussian Processed Label (FW-GPL) method to mitigate the overlap problem in the neighboring ordinal category when scoring images. Many published conventional methods treat this challenge as a traditional regression problem and make a strong assumption that each ordinal category owns an adequate intrinsic rank to outline its distribution. Our FW-GPL method aims to refine the ordinal label pattern by using two novel techniques: (1) assembling fuzzy logic to the fully connected layer of convolution neural networks and (2) transforming the ordinal labels with a Gaussian process. Specifically, it incorporates a heuristic fuzzy logic from the ordinal characteristic and simultaneously plugs in ordinal distribution shapes that penalize the difference between the targeted label and its neighbors to ensure a concentrated regional distribution. Accordingly, the function of these proposed windows is leveraged to minimize the influence of majority classes that mislead the prediction of minority samples. Our model is specifically designed to carefully avoid partially missing continuous facial-age segments. It can perform competitively when using the whole continuous facial-age dataset. Extensive experimental results on three facial-aging datasets and one ambiguous medical dataset demonstrate that our FW-GPL can achieve compelling performance results compared to the State-Of-The-Art (SOTA).

Keywords

• scoring images
• Gaussian process
• fuzzy logic
• ordinal image
• neighbor ambiguity