Evolutionary Gabor filter optimization with application to vehicle detection

Despite the considerable amount of research work on the application of Gabor filters in pattern classification, their design and selection have been mostly done on a trial and error basis. Existing techniques are either only suitable for a small number of filters or less problem-oriented. A systematic and general evolutionary Gabor filter optimization (EGFO) approach that yields a more optimal, problem-specific, set of filters is proposed in this study. The EGFO approach unifies filter design with filter selection by integrating genetic algorithms (GAs) with an incremental clustering approach. Specifically, filter design is performed using GAs, a global optimization approach that encodes the parameters of the Gabor filters in a chromosome and uses genetic operators to optimize them. Filter selection is performed by grouping together filters having similar characteristics (i.e., similar parameters) using incremental clustering in the parameter space. Each group of filters is represented by a single filter whose parameters correspond to the average parameters of the filters in the group. This step eliminates redundant filters, leading to a compact, optimized set of filters. The average filters are evaluated using an application-oriented fitness criterion based on support vector machines (SVMs). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have considered the challenging problem of vehicle detection from gray-scale images. Our experimental results illustrate that the set of Gabor filters, specifically optimized for the problem of vehicle detection, yield better performance than using traditional filter banks.