A Domain Independent Genetic Programming Approach to Automatic Feature Extraction for Image Classification

In this paper we explore the application of Genetic Programming (GP) to the problem of domain-independent image feature extraction and classification. We propose a new GP-based image classification system that extracts image features autonomously, and compare its performance against a baseline GP-based classifier system that uses human-extracted features. We found that the proposed system has a similar performance to the baseline system, and that GP is capable of evolving a single program that can both extract useful features and use those features to classify an image.