Towards automated creation of image interpretation systems

Abstract

Automated image interpretation is an important task in numerous applications ranging from security systems to natural resource inventorization based on remote-sensing. Recently, a second generation of adaptive machine-learned image interpretation systems have shown expert-level performance in several challenging domains. While demonstrating an unprecedented improvement over hand-engineered and first generation machine-learned systems in terms of cross-domain portability, design-cycle time, and robustness, such systems are still severely limited. This paper inspects the anatomy of the state-of-the-art Multi resolution Adaptive Object Recognition framework (MR ADORE) and presents extensions that aim at removing the last vestiges of human intervention still present in the original design of ADORE. More specifically, feature selection is still a task performed by human domain experts and represents a major stumbling block in the creation process of fully autonomous image interpretation systems. This paper focuses on minimizing such need for human engineering. After discussing experimental results, showing the performance of the framework extensions in the domain of forestry, the paper concludes by outlining autonomous feature extraction methods that may completely remove the need for human expertise in the feature selection process.