Applied Soft Computing Journal 97 (2020) 106675
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Applied Soft Computing Journal
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/asoc
Editorial
Special Issue on Evolutionary Computer Vision, Image Processing and
Pattern Recognition
Overview
The intertwining disciplines of computer vision, image anal-
ysis, signal processing and pattern recognition are major fields
of computer science, computer engineering, and electrical and
electronic engineering, which have attracted the interest of many
researchers. The past and ongoing research covers a wide range of
topics and tasks, from pure research to a huge num- ber of real-
world industrial applications. To deal with these problems/tasks,
many traditional and recent methods, algorithms and techniques
have been developed, among which evolutionary computation
(EC), including evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence and
other paradigms, has played an increasingly important role. The
terms Evolutionary Computer Vision, Evolutionary Image Anal-
ysis, and Evolutionary Pattern Recognition are more and more
commonly accepted as descriptors of a clearly defined research
area and family of techniques and applications. This has also been
favoured by the recent availability of environments for computer
hardware and systems such as GPUs and grid/cloud/parallel com-
puting systems, whose architecture and computation paradigm fit
EC algorithms extremely well, alleviating the intrinsically heavy
computational burden imposed by such techniques and allowing
even for the development of real-time applications.
This special issue has brought together researchers to report
state-of-the-art contributions on the latest research and devel-
opment, up-to-date issues, and challenges in the field of Evolu-
tionary Computer Vision, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition
and related applications. The new theories and methods in dif-
ferent EC paradigms include evolutionary algorithms such as ge-
netic algorithms (GAs), genetic programming (GP) and evolution-
ary strategies (ES), swarm intelligence methods such as particle
swarm optimisation (PSO) and differential evolution (DE), and
other EC approaches such as evolutionary multi-objective optimi-
sation, evolutionary learning, and memetic computing. The com-
puter vision and image processing applications include edge de-
tection, image segmentation, image reconstruction, image feature
extraction, image and object detection and classification, vehicle
plate detection, face detection and recognition, image encryp-
tion, texture image analysis, handwritten recognition, and visual
tracking. The pattern recognition tasks comprise classification,
regression, clustering, feature selection/construction and dimen-
sionality reduction, generalisation, unbalanced data processing,
and medical and bio-medical data analysis.
We have received 135 papers after publicly distributing the
Call-For-Papers on 1 July 2017. With the record number of sub-
missions and variations of the article types during review and re-
visions, it took much longer than expected to complete the review
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2020.106675
1568-4946/© 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V.
process and finalise this special issue. Following three rounds of
rigorous review process, 12 high quality papers were selected and
published in this volume. For presentation and reading conve-
nience, we categorise the 12 papers into two sections: Evolution-
ary Computation for Computer Vision and Image Processing, and
Evolutionary Computation for Pattern Recognition.
Evolutionary computer vision and image processing
In this special issue, we have collected seven papers using
evolutionary computation techniques for computer vision and
image processing.
The first paper, entitled ‘‘A combination of spectral graph
theory and quantum genetic algorithm to find relevant set of
electrodes for motor imagery classification’’, presents a new elec-
trodes selection method for binary motor imagery classification
that combines the graph theoretic spectral method and the quan-
tum genetic algorithm in order to select the electrodes that are
most relevant to motor imagery. The proposed method aims to
optimise the number of electrodes by removing irrelevant and re-
dundant electrodes. Stationary Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are
used for extracting features from the selected electrodes while
support vector machines handle the classification of the extracted
features. The experimental results on a publicly available dataset
show that the proposed method has significantly outperformed
the existing CSP and its variants.
The second paper included in the special issue is entitled
‘‘Human mental search-based multilevel thresholding for image
segmentation’’. A new multilevel thresholding method is pro-
posed in this paper that aims at utilising a human mental search
evolutionary algorithm to automatically find an optimal set of
thresholding values. The performance of the proposed method
has been assessed and compared to that of seven other evolution-
ary computation methods on a publicly and widely used dataset.
The results show the superiority of the newly introduced method
where significantly better performance is achieved compared to
the competitor methods.
‘‘An evolutionary hyper-heuristic to optimise deep belief net-
works for image reconstruction’’ utilises an evolutionary hyper-
heuristic method to optimise Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) for
image reconstruction. The proposed method searches automati-
cally for a suitable set of parameters to improve the performance
of DBNs. A non-parametric statistical test is used to select a
subset of effective operators for the different phases to reduce
the search space. Using three benchmark image datasets, the
S. Cagnoni, H. Al-Sahaf, Y. Sun et al.
performance of the proposed method is assessed and compared to
four other evolutionary computation methods. The experimental
results show that the proposed method outperforms all the other
methods on the three datasets.
The fourth paper ‘‘Particle swarm optimization Markov Chain
Monte Carlo for accurate visual tracking with adaptive template
update’’ proposes a novel tracking method to infer a target state
and appearance template simultaneously, which can accurately
estimate the target state and robustly update the target template.
To tackle the joint inference, the proposed method is used for
finding the target state and locating the appearance template
by combining PSO and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. Ex-
perimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker adap-
tively updates the target template and outperforms state-of-the-
art tracking methods on a benchmark dataset.
The paper entitled ‘‘Automatic adjustment of the pulse-coupled
neural network hyperparameters based on differential evolution
and cluster validity index for image segmentation’’ proposes a
method using Differential Evolution (DE) to optimise the hy-
perparameters of the pulse-coupled neural networks for image
segmentation applications. The proposed method utilises the
cluster validity index as the fitness function, which defines a
relationship between inter-group separation and intra-group co-
hesion. The proposed method is tested on a dataset of natural
images. The experimental results reveal the promising perfor-
mance of the proposed method on the mean Jaccard value and
the entropy criterion. Besides this, the proposed method is also
tested on two modalities of medical images to demonstrate the
applicability of the proposed method to other kinds of images.
‘‘Kapurs entropy based optimal multilevel image segmenta-
tion using Crow Search Algorithm’’ concerns image segmenta-
tion using a multilevel thresholding schema, and presents the
Kapur’s entropy-based Crow Search algorithm to estimate the
optimal values of the multilevel thresholds. In the presented
algorithm, Kapur’s entropy is used as an objective function during
the optimisation process. The proposed algorithm is validated
on benchmark images for 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 threshold values,
and compared with PSO, DE, Grey Wolf Optimiser, Moth Flame
Optimisation, and Cuckoo Search. The experimental results show
that the proposed algorithm performs better than the ones used
as references.
The seventh paper ‘‘A metaheuristic-driven approach to fine-
tune Deep Boltzmann Machines’’ adopts various metaheuristic
optimisation techniques from different swarm intelligence algo-
rithms for the task of fine-tuning the hyperparameters of deep
Boltzmann machines. The performance of the proposed method
has been assessed on three benchmark datasets for binary re-
construction. The experimental results show that the proposed
method has obtained comparable results to the existing methods
on those datasets without using expensive resources.
Evolutionary pattern recognition
This special issue also includes five papers that apply evolu-
tionary computation techniques to pattern recognition problems.
The paper entitled ‘‘Investigating the impact of data normaliza-
tion on classification performance’’ presents an investigation of
the impact of fourteen data normalisation techniques on classifi-
cation in conjunction with feature selection and feature weight-
ing techniques. Furthermore, the paper proposes a modified ant
lion optimisation method to automatically search the feature
space and select the best feature weights along with the parame-
ter of the nearest neighbour classifier. The experimental results
reveal that there is not any single global data normalisation
method that is better than all others. Hence, the paper suggests a
set of the best and worst methods for different feature selection
and weighting tasks.
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Applied Soft Computing Journal 97 (2020) 106675
The second paper ‘‘Hybridization of Chaos and Flower Polli-
nation Algorithm over K-Means for data clustering’’ hybridizes
the Chaos and Flower Pollination algorithms to improve the effi-
ciency of the k-means clustering algorithm by minimising cluster
integrity. Using 16 benchmark datasets, the performance of the
proposed method has been assessed and compared to that 4of
six benchmark methods. The experimental results show that the
newly introduced algorithm outperforms the other algorithms in
most cases and largely improves the performance of k-means
clustering.
‘‘Toxicity risks evaluation of unknown FDA biotransformed
drugs based on a multi-objective feature selection approach’’
considers the importance of evaluating the risk factors of un-
known biotransformed drugs in drug development, as well as
the time-consuming and the expensive nature of the current
evaluation methods. The authors propose a multi-objective opti-
misation algorithm to minimise the number of selected features
and maximise the dependency degree of the descriptors for an
effective evaluation. The experimental results show that the pro-
posed algorithm achieves high accuracy in forecasting all toxic
effects, which indicates the applicability of the proposed method
in the early stage of the drug development.
The paper entitled ‘‘Mining significant fuzzy association rules
with differential evolution algorithm’’ presents a new differential
evolution algorithm for mining optimised statistically significant
fuzzy association rules with strict control over the risk of spurious
rules. The most distinctive feature of the proposed algorithm
lies in the risk control over generating spurious rules and is
realised via two new statistically sound significance tests on the
rules. Case studies on hotel room price determinants and wildfire
risk factors demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed
algorithm.
The last paper included in this section, entitled ‘‘An improved
runner-root algorithm for solving feature selection problems
based on rough sets and neighborhood rough sets’’, aims at
solving the feature selection problem from datasets containing a
large number of redundant features, by hybridising the rough set
and neighbourhood rough set methods. Although both methods
are powerful, they suffer from high time complexity. To address
this concern, a new metaheuristic algorithm named the runner-
root algorithm is introduced into both methods. The performance
of the proposed approach is validated on the UCI datasets, and
the experimental results show the superiority of the proposed
algorithm over the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The guest editors of this special issue would like to thank the
authors for submitting their valuable research outcomes as well
as the reviewers who have critically evaluated the papers. We
sincerely hope and expect that readers will find this special issue
useful.
S. Cagnoni, H. Al-Sahaf, Y. Sun et al.
Special issue guest editors
Stefano Cagnoni
Department of Engineering and Architecture, University of
Parma, Parma, Italy
Harith Al-Sahaf
Evolutionary Computation Research Group, School of Engineering
and Computer Science, Victoria University of
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Applied Soft Computing Journal 97 (2020) 106675
Yanan Sun
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
Bing Xue
Mengjie Zhang
Evolutionary Computation Research Group, School of Engineering
and Computer Science, Victoria University of
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand