Light-Weight Evolutionary Computation for Complex Image-Processing Applications

Abstract

The expedience of today's image-processing applications is not any longer based on the performance of a single algorithm alone. These systems appear to be complex frameworks with a lot of subtasks that are solved by specific algorithms, adaptation procedures, data handling, scheduling, and parameter choices. The venture of using computational intelligence (CI) in such a context, thus, is not a matter of a single approach. Among the great choice of techniques to inject CI in an image-processing framework, the primary focus of this talk will be on the usage of so-called Tiny-GAs. This stands for an evolutionary procedure with low efforts, i.e. small population size (like 10 individuals), little number of generations, and a simple fitness. Obviously, this is not suitable for solving highly complex optimization tasks, but the primary interest here is not the best individuals' fitness, but the fortune of the algorithm and its population, which has just escaped the Monte-Carlo domain after random initialization. That this approach can work in practice will be demonstrated by means of selected image-processing applications, especially in the context of linear regression and line fitting; evolutionary post processing of various clustering results, in order to select a most suitable one by similarity; classification by the fitness values obtained after a few generations as well as segmentation of the main-color region.