Object detection via feature synthesis using MDL-based genetic programming

In this paper, we use genetic programming (GP) to synthesize composite operators and composite features from combinations of primitive operations and primitive features for object detection. The motivation for using GP is to overcome the human experts´ limitations of focusing only on conventional combinations of primitive image processing operations in the feature synthesis. GP attempts many unconventional combinations that in some cases yield exceptionally good results. To improve the efficiency of GP and prevent its well-known code bloat problem without imposing severe restriction on the GP search, we design a new fitness function based on minimum description length principle to incorporate both the pixel labeling error and the size of a composite operator into the fitness evaluation process. To further improve the efficiency of GP, smart crossover, smart mutation and a public library ideas are incorporated to identify and keep the effective components of composite operators. Our experiments, which are performed on selected training regions of a training image to reduce the training time, show that compared to normal GP, our GP algorithm finds effective composite operators more quickly and the learned composite operators can be applied to the whole training image and other similar testing images. Also, compared to a traditional region-of-interest extraction algorithm, the composite operators learned by GP are more effective and efficient for object detection.