A Region Adaptive Image Classification Approach Using Genetic Programming

Feature extraction, as one essential step of image classification, can potentially reduce image data dimensionality and capture effective information for improving performance. However, most existing image descriptors are designed to conduct specific tasks and might not be sufficient for different types of images. Genetic programming (GP) can automatically extract multiple important and discriminative features by incorporating diverse image descriptors into a GP program. Furthermore, different regions in an image have different structural characteristics. In this paper, we propose a region adaptive image classification approach based on GP, which can automatically extract informative image features by automatically applying different image descriptors in different regions of an image. A new flexible GP program structure with a new function set and a new terminal set is developed in this approach. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on four various data sets and compared with other state-of-the-art classification methods. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed approach is capable of achieving better or competitive performance than these baseline methods. Further analysis of some good programs shows the high interpretability of the proposed method.