ELCVIA Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (Sep 2014)

Swarm-based Descriptor Combination and its Application for Image Classification

  • Alex Fernandes Mansano,
  • Jessica Akemi Matsuoka,
  • Nikolas Mota Abiuzzi,
  • Luis Claudio Sugi Afonso,
  • Joao Paulo Papa,
  • Fábio A Faria,
  • Ricardo Silva Torres,
  • Alexandre Xavier Falcao

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/elcvia.566
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 3

Abstract

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In this paper, we deal with the descriptor combination problem in image classification tasks. This problem refers to the definition of an appropriate combination of image content descriptors that characterize different visual properties, such as color, shape and texture. In this paper, we propose to model the descriptor combination as a swarm-based optimization problem, which finds out the set of parameters that maximizes the classification accuracy of the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier. In our model, a descriptor is seen as a pair composed of a feature extraction algorithm and a suitable distance function. Our strategy here is to combine distance scores defined by different descriptors, as well as to employ them to weight OPF edges, which connect samples in the feature space. An extensive evaluation of several swarm-based optimization techniques was performed. Experimental results have demonstrated the robustness of the proposed combination approach.