An Effective Feature Learning Approach Using Genetic Programming With Image Descriptors for Image Classification [Research Frontier]

Being able to extract effective features from different images is very important for image classification, but it is challenging due to high variations across images. By integrating existing well-developed feature descriptors into learning algorithms, it is possible to automatically extract informative high-level features for image classification. As a learning algorithm with a flexible representation and good global search ability, genetic programming can achieve this. In this paper, a new genetic programming-based feature learning approach is developed to automatically select and combine five existing well-developed descriptors to extract high-level features for image classification. The new approach can automatically learn various numbers of global and/or local features from different types of images. The results show that the new approach achieves significantly better classification performance in almost all the comparisons on eight data sets of varying difficulty. Further analysis reveals the effectiveness of the new approach to finding the most effective feature descriptors or combinations of them to extract discriminative features for different classification tasks.