Abstract: A standard way to deal with multi-class categorization problems is by the combination of binary classifiers in a pairwise voting procedure. Recently, this classical approach has been formalized in the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In the ECOC framework, the one-versus-one coding demonstrates to achieve higher performance than the rest of coding designs. The binary problems that we train in the one-versus-one strategy are significantly smaller than in the rest of designs, and usually easier to be learnt, taking into account the smaller overlapping between classes. However, a high percentage of the positions coded by zero of the coding matrix, which implies a high sparseness degree, does not codify meta-class membership information. In this paper, we show that using the training data we can redefine without re-training, in a problem-dependent way, the one-versus-one coding matrix so that the new coded information helps the system to increase its generalization capability. Moreover, the new re-coding strategy is generalized to be applied over any binary code. The results over several UCI Machine Learning repository data sets and two real multi-class problems show that performance improvements can be obtained re-coding the classical one-versus-one and Sparse random designs compared to different state-of-the-art ECOC configurations.

Abstract: Many symbol recognition problems require the use of robust descriptors in order to obtain rich information of the data. However, the research of a good descriptor is still an open issue due to the high variability of symbols appearance. Rotation, partial occlusions, elastic deformations, intra-class and inter-class variations, or high variability among symbols due to different writing styles, are just a few problems. In this paper, we introduce a symbol shape description to deal with the changes in appearance that these types of symbols suffer. The shape of the symbol is aligned based on principal components to make the recognition invariant to rotation and reflection. Then, we present the Blurred Shape Model descriptor (BSM), where new features encode the probability of appearance of each pixel that outlines the symbols shape. Moreover, we include the new descriptor in a system to deal with multi-class symbol categorization problems. Adaboost is used to train the binary classifiers, learning the BSM features that better split symbol classes. Then, the binary problems are embedded in an Error-Correcting Output Codes framework (ECOC) to deal with the multi-class case. The methodology is evaluated on different synthetic and real data sets. State-of-the-art descriptors and classifiers are compared, showing the robustness and better performance of the present scheme to classify symbols with high variability of appearance.

Abstract: IF JCR 1.455 2010 25/99
In volume visualization, the definition of the regions of interest is inherently an iterative trial-and-error process finding out the best parameters to classify and render the final image. Generally, the user requires a lot of expertise to analyze and edit these parameters through multi-dimensional transfer functions. In this paper, we present a framework of intelligent methods to label on-demand multiple regions of interest. These methods can be split into a two-level GPU-based labelling algorithm that computes in time of rendering a set of labelled structures using the Machine Learning Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In a pre-processing step, ECOC trains a set of Adaboost binary classifiers from a reduced pre-labelled data set. Then, at the testing stage, each classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabelled samples and combined to perform multi-class labelling. We also propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allows to highly parallelize the testing stage. To exploit that parallelism we implemented the testing stage in GPU-OpenCL. The empirical results on different data sets for several volume structures shows high computational performance and classification accuracy.