Abstract: The high variability of sign appearance in uncontrolled environments has made the detection and classification of road signs a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for the detection and classification of traffic signs. Detection is based on a boosted detectors cascade, trained with a novel evolutionary version of Adaboost, which allows the use of large feature spaces. Classification is defined as a multiclass categorization problem. A battery of classifiers is trained to split classes in an Error-Correcting Output Code (ECOC) framework. We propose an ECOC design through a forest of optimal tree structures that are embedded in the ECOC matrix. The novel system offers high performance and better accuracy than the state-of-the-art strategies and is potentially better in terms of noise, affine deformation, partial occlusions, and reduced illumination.

Abstract: The problem of training classifiers only with target data arises in many applications where non-target data are too costly, difficult to obtain, or not available at all. Several one-class classification methods have been presented to solve this problem, but most of the methods are highly sensitive to the presence of outliers in the target class. Ensemble methods have therefore been proposed as a powerful way to improve the classification performance of binary/multi-class learning algorithms by introducing diversity into classifiers.
However, their application to one-class classification has been rather limited. In
this paper, we present a new ensemble method based on a non-parametric weighted bagging strategy for one-class classification, to improve accuracy in the presence of outliers. While the standard bagging strategy assumes a uniform data distribution, the method we propose here estimates a probability density based on a forest structure of the data. This assumption allows the estimation of data distribution from the computation of simple univariate and bivariate kernel densities. Experiments using original and noisy versions of 20 different datasets show that bagging ensemble methods applied to different one-class classifiers outperform base one-class classification methods. Moreover, we show that, in noisy versions of the datasets, the non-parametric weighted bagging strategy we propose outperforms the classical bagging strategy in a statistically significant way.

Abstract: This article introduces a novel binary discriminative learning technique based on the approximation of the non-linear decision boundary by a piece-wise linear smooth additive model. The decision border is geometrically defined by means of the characterizing boundary points – points that belong to the optimal boundary under a certain notion of robustness. Based on these points, a set of locally robust linear classifiers is defined and assembled by means of a Tikhonov regularized optimization procedure in an additive model to create a final lambda-smooth decision rule. As a result, a very simple and robust classifier with a strong geometrical meaning and non-linear behavior is obtained. The simplicity of the method allows its extension to cope with some of nowadays machine learning challenges, such as online learning, large scale learning or parallelization, with linear computational complexity. We validate our approach on the UCI database. Finally, we apply our technique in online and large scale scenarios, and in six real life computer vision and pattern recognition problems: gender recognition, intravascular ultrasound tissue classification, speed traffic sign detection, Chagas' disease severity detection, clef classification and action recognition using a 3D accelerometer data. The results are promising and this paper opens a line of research that deserves further attention