Evolving novel image features using genetic programming-based image transforms

  • Authors:
  • Taras Kowaliw;Wolfgang Banzhaf;Nawwaf Kharma;Simon Harding

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada;Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada;Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada

  • Venue:
  • CEC'09 Proceedings of the Eleventh conference on Congress on Evolutionary Computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we use Genetic Programming (GP) to define a set of transforms on the space of greyscale images. The motivation is to allow an evolutionary algorithm means of transforming a set of image patterns into a more classifiable form. To this end, we introduce the notion of a Transform-based Evolvable Feature (TEF), a moment value extracted from a GP-transformed image, used in a classification task. Unlike many previous approaches, the TEF allows the whole image space to be searched and augmented. TEFs are instantiated through Cartesian Genetic Programming, and applied to a medical image classification task, that of detecting muscular dystrophy-indicating inclusions in cell images. It is shown that the inclusion of a single TEF allows for significantly superior classification relative to predefined features alone.