Aizhu Zhang

A novel hybrid algorithm of gravitational search algorithm with genetic algorithm for multi-level thresholding

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted The multi-level thresholding is a popular method for image segmentation. However, the method is computationally expensive and suffers from premature convergence when level increases. To solve the two problems, this paper presents an advanced version of gravitational search algorithm (GSA), namely hybrid algorithm of GSA with genetic algorithm (GA) (GSA-GA) for multi-level thresholding. In GSA-GA, when premature convergence occurred, the roulette selection and discrete mutation operators of GA are introduced to diversify the population and escape from premature convergence. The introduction of these operators therefore promotes GSA-GA to perform faster and more accurate multi-level image thresholding. In this paper, two common criteria (1) entropy and (2) between-class variance were utilized as fitness functions. Experiments have been performed on six test images using various numbers of thresholds. The experimental results were compared with standard GSA and three state-of-art GSA variants. Comparison results showed that the GSA-GA produced superior or comparative segmentation accuracy in both entropy and between-class variance criteria. Moreover, the statistical significance test demonstrated that GSA-GA significantly reduce the computational complexity for all of the tested images.

A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Gravitational Search Algorithm for Global Optimization

The laws of gravity and mass interactions inspire the gravitational search algorithm (GSA), which nds optimal regions of complex search spaces through the interaction of individuals in a population of particles. Although GSA has proven effective in both science and engineering, it is still easy to suffer from premature convergence especially facing complex problems. In this paper, we pro- posed a new hybrid algorithm by integrating genetic algorithm (GA) and GSA (GA-GSA) to avoid premature convergence and to improve the search ability of GSA. In GA-GSA, crossover and mutation operators are introduced from GA to GSA for jumping out of the local optima. To demonstrate the search ability of the proposed GA-GSA, 23 complex benchmark test functions were employed, including unimodal and multimodal high-dimensional test functions as well as multimodal test functions with xed dimensions. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were also utilized to execute statistical analysis of the results obtained by PSO, GSA, and GA-GSA. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is both efficient and effective.

A stability constrained adaptive alpha for gravitational search algorithm

Abstract Gravitational search algorithm (GSA), a recent meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by Newtons law of gravity and mass interactions, shows good performance in various optimization problems. In GSA, the gravitational constant attenuation factor alpha (α) plays a vital role in convergence and the balance between exploration and exploitation. However, in GSA and most of its variants, all agents share the same α value without considering their evolutionary states, which has inevitably caused the premature convergence and imbalance of exploration and exploitation. In order to alleviate these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a new variant of GSA, namely stability constrained adaptive alpha for GSA (SCAA). In SCAA, each agents evolutionary state is estimated, which is then combined with the variation of the agents position and fitness feedback to adaptively adjust the value of α. Moreover, to preserve agents’ stable trajectories and improve convergence precision, a boundary constraint is derived from the stability conditions of GSA to restrict the value of α in each iteration. The performance of SCAA has been evaluated by comparing with the original GSA and four alpha adjusting algorithms on 13 conventional functions and 15 complex CEC2015 functions. The experimental results have demonstrated that SCAA has significantly better searching performance than its peers do.

Locally informed gravitational search algorithm

Gravitational search algorithm (GSA) has been successfully applied to many scientific and engineering applications in the past few years. In the original GSA and most of its variants, every agent learns from all the agents stored in the same elite group, namely Kbest. This type of learning strategy is in nature a fully-informed learning strategy, in which every agent has exactly the same global neighborhood topology structure. Obviously, the learning strategy overlooks the impact of environmental heterogeneity on individual behavior, which easily resulting in premature convergence and high runtime consuming. To tackle these problems, we take individual heterogeneity into account and propose a locally informed GSA (LIGSA) in this paper. To be specific, in LIGSA, each agent learns from its unique neighborhood formed by k local neighbors and the historically global best agent rather than from just the single Kbest elite group. Learning from the k local neighbors promotes LIGSA fully and quickly explores the search space as well as effectively prevents premature convergence while the guidance of global best agent can accelerate the convergence speed of LIGSA. The proposed LIGSA has been extensively evaluated on 30 CEC2014 benchmark functions with different dimensions. Experimental results reveal that LIGSA remarkably outperforms the compared algorithms in solution quality and convergence speed in general.

DMMOGSA: Diversity-enhanced and memory-based multi-objective gravitational search algorithm

Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is an important research topic in both science and engineering. This paper proposes a diversity-enhanced and memory-based multi-objective gravitational search algorithm (DMMOGSA). We combine the memory of the best states of individual particles and their population in their evolution paths and the gravitational rules to construct a new search strategy. Under this strategy, the position and mass states of each particle are updated based on the memory associated with it and the current states of all particles in the current population in terms of their gravitational forces on it. A novel diversity-enhancement mechanism is also employed to control the velocity of each particle for traveling to a new position. Experiments were conducted on 12 well-known benchmark functions, and for each function the results of DMMOGSA were compared with those of SPEA2, NSGA-II and MOPSO. Our results show that DMMOGSA can reduce the effect of premature convergence and achieve more reliable performance on most of the tested cases.

Stratified spectral mixture analysis of medium resolution imagery for impervious surface mapping

Linear spectral mixture analysis (LSMA) is widely employed in impervious surface estimation, especially for estimating impervious surface abundance in medium spatial resolution images. However, it suffers from a difficulty in endmember selection due to within-class spectral variability and the variation in the number and the type of endmember classes contained from pixel to pixel, which may lead to over or under estimation of impervious surface. Stratification is considered as a promising process to address the problem. This paper presents a stratified spectral mixture analysis in spectral domain (Sp_SSMA) for impervious surface mapping. It categorizes the entire data into three groups based on the Combinational Build-up Index (CBI), the intensity component in the color space and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values. A suitable endmember model is developed for each group to accommodate the spectral variation from group to group. The unmixing into the associated subset (or full set) of endmembers in each group can make the unmixing adaptive to the types of endmember classes that each pixel actually contains. Results indicate that the Sp_SSMA method achieves a better performance than full-set-endmember SMA and prior-knowledge-based spectral mixture analysis (PKSMA) in terms of R, RMSE and SE.

Dynamic Post-Earthquake Image Segmentation with an Adaptive Spectral-Spatial Descriptor

The region merging algorithm is a widely used segmentation technique for very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, the segmentation of post-earthquake VHR images is more difficult due to the complexity of these images, especially high intra-class and low inter-class variability among damage objects. Herein two key issues must be resolved: the first is to find an appropriate descriptor to measure the similarity of two adjacent regions since they exhibit high complexity among the diverse damage objects, such as landslides, debris flow, and collapsed buildings. The other is how to solve over-segmentation and under-segmentation problems, which are commonly encountered with conventional merging strategies due to their strong dependence on local information. To tackle these two issues, an adaptive dynamic region merging approach (ADRM) is introduced, which combines an adaptive spectral-spatial descriptor and a dynamic merging strategy to adapt to the changes of merging regions for successfully detecting objects scattered globally in a post-earthquake image. In the new descriptor, the spectral similarity and spatial similarity of any two adjacent regions are automatically combined to measure their similarity. Accordingly, the new descriptor offers adaptive semantic descriptions for geo-objects and thus is capable of characterizing different damage objects. Besides, in the dynamic region merging strategy, the adaptive spectral-spatial descriptor is embedded in the defined testing order and combined with graph models to construct a dynamic merging strategy. The new strategy can find the global optimal merging order and ensures that the most similar regions are merged at first. With combination of the two strategies, ADRM can identify spatially scattered objects and alleviates the phenomenon of over-segmentation and under-segmentation. The performance of ADRM has been evaluated by comparing with four state-of-the-art segmentation methods, including the fractal net evolution approach (FNEA, as implemented in the eCognition software, Trimble Inc., Westminster, CO, USA), the J-value segmentation (JSEG) method, the graph-based segmentation (GSEG) method, and the statistical region merging (SRM) approach. The experiments were conducted on six VHR subarea images captured by RGB sensors mounted on aerial platforms, which were acquired after the 2008 Wenchuan Ms 8.0 earthquake. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrated that the proposed method offers high feasibility and improved accuracy in the segmentation of post-earthquake VHR aerial images.

Gravitation-Based Edge Detection in Hyperspectral Images

Edge detection is one of the key issues in the field of computer vision and remote sensing image analysis. Although many different edge-detection methods have been proposed for gray-scale, color, and multispectral images, they still face difficulties when extracting edge features from hyperspectral images (HSIs) that contain a large number of bands with very narrow gap in the spectral domain. Inspired by the clustering characteristic of the gravitational theory, a novel edge-detection algorithm for HSIs is presented in this paper. In the proposed method, we first construct a joint feature space by combining the spatial and spectral features. Each pixel of HSI is assumed to be a celestial object in the joint feature space, which exerts gravitational force to each of its neighboring pixel. Accordingly, each object travels in the joint feature space until it reaches a stable equilibrium. At the equilibrium, the image is smoothed and the edges are enhanced, where the edge pixels can be easily distinguished by calculating the gravitational potential energy. The proposed edge-detection method is tested on several benchmark HSIs and the obtained results were compared with those of four state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed method.

Grayscale Image Segmentation Using Multilevel Thresholding and Nature-Inspired Algorithms

Multilevel image thresholding plays a crucial role in analyzing and interpreting the digital images. Previous studies revealed that classical exhaustive search techniques are time consuming as the number of thresholds increased. To solve the problem, many nature-inspired algorithms (NAs) which can produce high-quality solutions in reasonable time have been utilized for multilevel thresholding. This chapter discusses three typical kinds of NAs and their hybridizations in solving multilevel image thresholding. Accordingly, a novel hybrid algorithm of gravitational search algorithm (GSA) with genetic algorithm (GA), named GSA-GA, is proposed to explore optimal threshold values efficiently. The chosen objective functions in this chapter are Kapur’s entropy and Otsu criteria. This chapter conducted experiments on two well-known test images and two real satellite images using various numbers of thresholds to evaluate the performance of different NAs.

Classification of Post-earthquake High Resolution Image Using Adaptive Dynamic Region Merging and Gravitational Self-Organizing Maps

Post-earthquake high resolution image classification has opened up the possibility for rapid damage mapping, which is crucial for damage assessments and emergency rescue. However, the classification accuracy is challenged by the diversity of disaster types as well as the lack of uniform statistical characteristics in post-earthquake high resolution images. In this paper, combining adaptive dynamic region merging (ADRM) and gravitational self-organizing map (gSOM), we propose a novel object-based classification framework. This approach consists of two parts: the segmentation by ADRM and the classification by gSOM. The ADRM produces the homogeneous regions by integrating an adaptive spectral-texture descriptor with a dynamic merging strategy. The gSOM regards the regions as basic unit and characterized them explicitly by fractal texture to adapt to various disaster types. Subsequently, these regions are represented by neurons in a self-organizing map and clustered by adjacency gravitation. By moving the neurons around the gravitational space and merging them according to the gravitation, the gSOM is able to find arbitrary shape and determine the class number automatically. To confirm the validity of the presented approach, three aerial seismic images in Wenchuan covering several disaster types are utilized. The obtained quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrated the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed seismic image classification method.