Visual Learning by Evolutionary and Coevolutionary Feature Synthesis

In this paper, we present a novel method for learning complex concepts/hypotheses directly from raw training data. The task addressed here concerns data-driven synthesis of recognition procedures for real-world object recognition. The method uses linear genetic programming to encode potential solutions expressed in terms of elementary operations, and handles the complexity of the learning task by applying cooperative coevolution to decompose the problem automatically at the genotype level. The training coevolves feature extraction procedures, each being a sequence of elementary image processing and computer vision operations applied to input images. Extensive experimental results show that the approach attains competitive performance for three-dimensional object recognition in real synthetic aperture radar imagery.