Evolutionary feature synthesis by multi-dimensional particle swarm optimization

Several existing content-based image retrieval and classification systems rely on low-level features which are automatically extracted from images. However, often these features lack the discrimination power needed for accurate description of the image content and hence they may lead to a poor retrieval or classification performance. This article applies an evolutionary feature synthesis method based on multi-dimensional particle swarm optimization on low-level image features to enhance their discrimination ability. The proposed method can be applied on any database and low-level features as long as some ground-truth information is available. Content-based image retrieval experiments show that a significant performance improvement can be achieved.