David Masip

On the use of Monte Carlo simulation, cache and splitting techniques to improve the clarke and wright savings heuristics

This paper presents the SR-GCWS-CS probabilistic algorithm that combines Monte Carlo simulation with splitting techniques and the Clarke and Wright savings heuristic to find competitive quasi-optimal solutions to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) in reasonable response times. The algorithm, which does not require complex fine-tuning processes, can be used as an alternative to other metaheuristics—such as Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization or GRASP, which might be more difficult to implement and which might require non-trivial fine-tuning processes—when solving CVRP instances. As discussed in the paper, the probabilistic approach presented here aims to provide a relatively simple and yet flexible algorithm which benefits from: (a) the use of the geometric distribution to guide the random search process, and (b) efficient cache and splitting techniques that contribute to significantly reduce computational times. The algorithm is validated through a set of CVRP standard benchmarks and competitive results are obtained in all tested cases. Future work regarding the use of parallel programming to efficiently solve large-scale CVRP instances is discussed. Finally, it is important to notice that some of the principles of the approach presented here might serve as a base to develop similar algorithms for other routing and scheduling combinatorial problems.

Automatic Prediction of Facial Trait Judgments: Appearance vs. Structural Models

Evaluating other individuals with respect to personality characteristics plays a crucial role in human relations and it is the focus of attention for research in diverse fields such as psychology and interactive computer systems. In psychology, face perception has been recognized as a key component of this evaluation system. Multiple studies suggest that observers use face information to infer personality characteristics. Interactive computer systems are trying to take advantage of these findings and apply them to increase the natural aspect of interaction and to improve the performance of interactive computer systems. Here, we experimentally test whether the automatic prediction of facial trait judgments (e.g. dominance) can be made by using the full appearance information of the face and whether a reduced representation of its structure is sufficient. We evaluate two separate approaches: a holistic representation model using the facial appearance information and a structural model constructed from the relations among facial salient points. State of the art machine learning methods are applied to a) derive a facial trait judgment model from training data and b) predict a facial trait value for any face. Furthermore, we address the issue of whether there are specific structural relations among facial points that predict perception of facial traits. Experimental results over a set of labeled data (9 different trait evaluations) and classification rules (4 rules) suggest that a) prediction of perception of facial traits is learnable by both holistic and structural approaches; b) the most reliable prediction of facial trait judgments is obtained by certain type of holistic descriptions of the face appearance; and c) for some traits such as attractiveness and extroversion, there are relationships between specific structural features and social perceptions.

Boosted Online Learning for Face Recognition

Face recognition applications commonly suffer from three main drawbacks: a reduced training set, information lying in high-dimensional subspaces, and the need to incorporate new people to recognize. In the recent literature, the extension of a face classifier in order to include new people in the model has been solved using online feature extraction techniques. The most successful approaches of those are the extensions of the principal component analysis or the linear discriminant analysis. In the current paper, a new online boosting algorithm is introduced: a face recognition method that extends a boosting-based classifier by adding new classes while avoiding the need of retraining the classifier each time a new person joins the system. The classifier is learned using the multitask learning principle where multiple verification tasks are trained together sharing the same feature space. The new classes are added taking advantage of the structure learned previously, being the addition of new classes not computationally demanding. The present proposal has been (experimentally) validated with two different facial data sets by comparing our approach with the current state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that the proposed online boosting algorithm fares better in terms of final accuracy. In addition, the global performance does not decrease drastically even when the number of classes of the base problem is multiplied by eight.

Shared Feature Extraction for Nearest Neighbor Face Recognition

In this paper, we propose a new supervised linear feature extraction technique for multiclass classification problems that is specially suited to the nearest neighbor classifier (NN). The problem of finding the optimal linear projection matrix is defined as a classification problem and the Adaboost algorithm is used to compute it in an iterative way. This strategy allows the introduction of a multitask learning (MTL) criterion in the method and results in a solution that makes no assumptions about the data distribution and that is specially appropriated to solve the small sample size problem. The performance of the method is illustrated by an application to the face recognition problem. The experiments show that the representation obtained following the multitask approach improves the classic feature extraction algorithms when using the NN classifier, especially when we have a few examples from each class.

Boosted discriminant projections for nearest neighbor classification

In this paper we introduce a new embedding technique to find the linear projection that best projects labeled data samples into a new space where the performance of a Nearest Neighbor classifier is maximized. We consider a large set of one-dimensional projections and combine them into a projection matrix, which is not restricted to be orthogonal. The embedding is defined as a classifier selection task that makes use of the AdaBoost algorithm to find an optimal set of discriminant projections. The main advantage of the algorithm is that the final projection matrix does not make any global assumption on the data distribution, and the projection matrix is created by minimizing the classification error in the training data set. Also the resulting features can be ranked according to a set of coefficients computed during the algorithm. The performance of our embedding is tested in two different pattern recognition tasks, a gender recognition problem and the classification of manuscript digits.

An ensemble-based method for linear feature extraction for two-class problems

In this paper we propose three variants of a linear feature extraction technique based on Adaboost for two-class classification problems. Unlike other feature extraction techniques, we do not make any assumptions about the distribution of the data. At each boosting step we select from a pool of linear projections the one that minimizes the weighted error. We propose three different variants of the feature extraction algorithm, depending on the way the pool of individual projections is constructed. Using nine real and two artificial data sets of different original dimensionality and sample size we compare the performance of the three proposed techniques with three classical techniques for linear feature extraction: Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLD), Nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and a recently proposed feature extraction method for heteroscedastic data based on the Chernoff criterion. Our results show that for data sets of relatively low-original dimensionality FLD appears to be both the most accurate and the most economical feature extraction method (giving just one-dimension in the case of two classes). The techniques based on Adaboost fare better than the classical techniques for data sets of large original dimensionality.

Preferred Spatial Frequencies for Human Face Processing Are Associated with Optimal Class Discrimination in the Machine

Psychophysical studies suggest that humans preferentially use a narrow band of low spatial frequencies for face recognition. Here we asked whether artificial face recognition systems have an improved recognition performance at the same spatial frequencies as humans. To this end, we estimated recognition performance over a large database of face images by computing three discriminability measures: Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis, Non-Parametric Discriminant Analysis, and Mutual Information. In order to address frequency dependence, discriminabilities were measured as a function of (filtered) image size. All three measures revealed a maximum at the same image sizes, where the spatial frequency content corresponds to the psychophysical found frequencies. Our results therefore support the notion that the critical band of spatial frequencies for face recognition in humans and machines follows from inherent properties of face images, and that the use of these frequencies is associated with optimal face recognition performance.

Are External Face Features Useful for Automatic Face Classification

In this paper a new experiment using the FRGC database is proposed. The experiment deals with the use of external face features for face classification. Unlike the most part of algorithms that can be found in the literature for classifying faces, we consider the external information located at hair and ears as a reliable source of information. These features have often been discarded due to the difficulty of their extraction and alignment, and the lack of robustness in security related applications. Nevertheless, there are a lot of applications where these considerations are not valid, and the proper processing of external features can be an important additional source of information for classifications tasks. We also propose, following this assumption, a method for extracting external information from face images. The method is based on a top-down reconstructionbased algorithm for extracting the external face features. Once extracted, they are encoded in a second step using the Non Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm, yielding an aligned high dimensional feature vector. This method has been used in a gender recognition problem, concluding that the encoded information is useful for classification purposes.

A sparse Bayesian approach for joint feature selection and classifier learning

In this paper we present a new method for Joint Feature Selection and Classifier Learning using a sparse Bayesian approach. These tasks are performed by optimizing a global loss function that includes a term associated with the empirical loss and another one representing a feature selection and regularization constraint on the parameters. To minimize this function we use a recently proposed technique, the Boosted Lasso algorithm, that follows the regularization path of the empirical risk associated with our loss function. We develop the algorithm for a well known non-parametrical classification method, the relevance vector machine, and perform experiments using a synthetic data set and three databases from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The results show that our method is able to select the relevant features, increasing in some cases the classification accuracy when feature selection is performed.

Online error correcting output codes

This article proposes a general extension of the error correcting output codes framework to the online learning scenario. As a result, the final classifier handles the addition of new classes independently of the base classifier used. In particular, this extension supports the use of both online example incremental and batch classifiers as base learners. The extension of the traditional problem independent codings one-versus-all and one-versus-one is introduced. Furthermore, two new codings are proposed, unbalanced online ECOC and a problem dependent online ECOC. This last online coding technique takes advantage of the problem data for minimizing the number of dichotomizers used in the ECOC framework while preserving a high accuracy. These techniques are validated on an online setting of 11 data sets from UCI database and applied to two real machine vision applications: traffic sign recognition and face recognition. As a result, the online ECOC techniques proposed provide a feasible and robust way for handling new classes using any base classifier.