This book explains the theory and application of evolutionary computer vision, a new paradigm where challenging vision problems can be approached using the techniques of evolutionary computing. This methodology achieves excellent results for defining fitness functions and representations for problems by merging evolutionary computation with mathematical optimization to produce automatic creation of emerging visual behaviors. In the first part of the book the author surveys the literature in concise form, defines the relevant terminology, and offers historical and philosophical motivations for the key research problems in the field. For researchers from the computer vision community, he offers a simple introduction to the evolutionary computing paradigm. The second part of the book focuses on implementing evolutionary algorithms that solve given problems using working programs in the major fields of low-, intermediate- and high-level computer vision. This book will be of value to researchers, engineers, and students in the fields of computer vision, evolutionary computing, robotics, biologically inspired mechatronics, electronics engineering, control, and artificial intelligence.

This book presents the use of efficient Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms for solving diverse real-world image processing and pattern recognition problems. It provides an overview of the different aspects of evolutionary methods in order to enable the reader in reaching a global understanding of the field and, in conducting studies on specific evolutionary techniques that are related to applications in image processing and pattern recognition. It explains the basic ideas of the proposed applications in a way that can also be understood by readers outside of the field. Image processing and pattern recognition practitioners who are not evolutionary computation researchers will appreciate the discussed techniques beyond simple theoretical tools since they have been adapted to solve significant problems that commonly arise on such areas. On the other hand, members of the evolutionary computation community can learn the way in which image processing and pattern recognition problems can be translated into an optimization task. The book has been structured so that each chapter can be read independently from the others. It can serve as reference book for students and researchers with basic knowledge in image processing and EC methods.

Integrates computer vision, pattern recognition, and AI. Presents original research that will benefit researchers and professionals in computer vision, pattern recognition, target recognition, machine learning, evolutionary learning, image processing, knowledge discovery and data mining, cybernetics, robotics, automation and psychology

This book offers several new GP approaches to feature learning for image classification. Image classification is an important task in computer vision and machine learning with a wide range of applications. Feature learning is a fundamental step in image classification, but it is difficult due to the high variations of images. Genetic Programming (GP) is an evolutionary computation technique that can automatically evolve computer programs to solve any given problem. This is an important research field of GP and image classification. No book has been published in this field. This book shows how different techniques, e.g., image operators, ensembles, and surrogate, are proposed and employed to improve the accuracy and/or computational efficiency of GP for image classification. The proposed methods are applied to many different image classification tasks, and the effectiveness and interpretability of the learned models will be demonstrated. This book is suitable as a graduate and postgraduate level textbook in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and evolutionary computation.