Coding and Decoding Design of ECOCs for Multi-class Pattern and Object Recognition

Place: Sala de Graus, Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria, ETSE, UAB.

Affiliation: Computer Vision Center, UAB  

Many real problems require multi-class decisions. In the Pattern Recognition field, many techniques have been proposed to deal with the binary problem. However, the extension of many 2-class classifiers to the multi-class case is a hard task. In this sense, Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) demonstrated to be a powerful tool to combine any number of binary classifiers to model multi-class problems. But there are still many open issues about the capabilities of the ECOC framework. In this thesis, the two main stages of an ECOC design are analyzed: the coding and the decoding steps. We present different problem-dependent designs. These designs take advantage of the knowledge of the problem domain to minimize the number of classifiers, obtaining a high classification performance. On the other hand, we analyze the ECOC codification in order to define new decoding rules that take full benefit from the information provided at the coding step. Moreover, as a successful classification requires a rich feature set, new feature detection/extraction techniques are presented and evaluated on the new ECOC designs. The evaluation of the new methodology is performed on different real and synthetic data sets: UCI Machine Learning Repository, handwriting symbols, tra±c signs from a Mobile Mapping System, Intravascular Ultrasound images, Caltech Repository data set or Chaga's disease data set. The results of this thesis show that significant performance improvements are obtained on both traditional coding and decoding ECOC designs when the new coding and decoding rules are taken into account.