Best method to recognize objects? - c++

I am trying to recognize traffic signs, I already detect them, but now I have to do something to know which one is each of them, I have been reading about the cascade classifier http://docs.opencv.org/doc/user_guide/ug_traincascade.html but i would need 1 for each sign right? Furthermore i am having some issues with the merging of vec files. What do you recommend me to use for this object recognition? i am not sure if the cascade classifer is the best method.....
Thanks a lot fot your help!!
I also posted it here: http://answers.opencv.org/question/65836/best-method-to-recognize-objects/

Try to use Statistical Invariants + Perceptron (or another classifier such SVM).
Statistical Invariants give abilities to calculate features which still constant under the translation, rotation, isotropic scaling. They are easy for understanding and don't require high computational cost.

Related

How do I answer this Computer Vision Theoretical question?

Suppose there is an image containing multiple objects of different types. The objective of the problem is to recognize objects using primary features of objects (colour, texture, shape). Explain your own idea what concepts will you apply, and how will you apply them, to differentiate/classify the objects in the image by extracting primary features (or combination of features) of objects. Also, justify how your idea can produce the best accuracy.
Since this is a theoretical question, it can have many answers. The simplest approach is to use k-means or weighted k-means, using the features you have. If you have quite unique features then k-means would be able to classify decently accurately. You might still have to juggle around finding how you would input some of the more esoteric features to k-means though. Other more involved methods would use your own trained model using CNN for classification using the features you provide.
Since this is a theoretical question this is all the answer I can provide you with.

Best way to feature select using PCA (discussion)

Terminology:
Component: PC
loading-score[i,j]: the j feature in PC[i]
Question:
I know the question regarding feature selection is asked several times here at StackOverflow (SO) and on other tech-pages, and it proposes different answers/discussion. That is why I want to open a discussion for the different solutions, and not post it as a general question since that has been done.
Different methods are proposed for feature selection using PCA: For instance using the dot product between the original features and the components (here) to get their correlation, a discussion at SO here suggests that you can only talk about important features as loading-scores in a component (and not use that importance in the input space), and another discussion at SO (which I cannot find at the moment) suggest that the importance for feature[j] would be abs(sum(loading_score[:,j]) i.e the sum of the absolute value of loading_score[i,j] for all i components.
I personally would think that a way to get the importance of a feature would be an absolute sum where each loading_score[i,j] is weighted by the explained variance of component i i.e
imp_feature[j]=sum_i (abs(loading_score[i,j])*explained_variance[i].
Well, there is no universal way to select features; it totally depends on the dataset and some insights available about the dataset. I will provide some examples which might be helpful.
Since you asked about PCA, initially it separates the whole dataset into two sets under which the variances. On the other ICA (Independent Component Analysis) is able to extract multiple features simultaneously. Look at this example,
In this example, we mix three independent signals and try to separate out them using ICA and PCA. In this case, ICA is doing it a better way than PCA. In general, if you search Blind Souce Separation (BSS) you may find more information about this. Besides, in this example, we know the independent components thus, separation is easy. In general, we do not know the number of components. Hence, you may have to guess based on some prior information about the dataset. Also, you may use LDA (Linear Discriminate Analysis) to reduce the number of features.
Once you extract PC components using any of the techniques, following way we can visualize it. If we assume, those extracted components as random variables i.e., x, y, z
More information about you may refer to this original source where I took about two figures.
Coming back to your proposition,
imp_feature[j]=sum_i (abs(loading_score[i,j])*explained_variance[i]
I would not recommend this way due to the following reasons:
abs(loading_score[i,j]) when we get absolute values you may loose positive or negative correlations of considered features. explained_variance[i] may be used to find the correlation between features, but multiplying does not make any sense.
Edit:
In PCA, each component has its explained variance. Explained variance is the ratio between individual component variance and total variance(sum of all individual components variances). Feature significance can be measured by magnitude of explained variance.
All in all, what I want to say, feature selection totally depends on the dataset and the significance of features. PCA is just one technique. Frist understand the properties of features and the dataset. Then, try to extract features. Hope this helps. If you can provide us with an exact example, we may provide more insights.

What are the main rates and values we should figure to evaluate both feature detection, description and matching?

I work on palmprint recognition using feature2D with Open_CV library, and I use algorithms such as SIFT, SURF, ORB... to detect features and extract/match descriptors. My test include (1 vs 1) palmprint and also (1 vs Data Base) of palmprint.
Ones I get the result, I need to evaluate the algorithm, and for this I know that there are some rates or scores (like EER, rank-1 identification, recall and accuracy) which gives an estimation about how much this method was successful. Now I need to know if any of those rates are implemented in Open_CV, and how to use them. If they aren't, what are the different formulas used in the literary.
As far as I know there is little implemented in OpenCV. A common way is to store the results (e.g. in JSON) and process those with other programs such as Matlab or Python. This also allows you to change the evaluation without the need to recompute the algorithms.
There is no overall best method to show the results. It always depends on what you want to show. In my opinion ROC is the best way to express your output. It is also very widely used in research.
If you insist on doing it in C++, then you could use:
Roceasy or
DLIB

What is considered a good accuracy for trained Word2Vec on an analogy test?

After training Word2Vec, how high should the accuracy be during testing on analogies? What level of accuracy should be expected if it is trained well?
The analogy test is just a interesting automated way to evaluate models, or compare algorithms.
It might not be the best indicator of how well word-vectors will work for your own project-specific goals. (That is, a model which does better on word-analogies might be worse for whatever other info-retrieval, or classification, or other goal you're really pursuing.) So if at all possible, create an automated evaluation that's tuned to your own needs.
Note that the absolute analogy scores can also be quite sensitive to how you trim the vocabulary before training, or how you treat analogy-questions with out-of-vocabulary words, or whether you trim results at the end to just higher-frequency words. Certain choices for each of these may boost the supposed "correctness" of the simple analogy questions, but not improve the overall model for more realistic applications.
So there's no absolute accuracy rate on these simplistic questions that should be the target. Only relative rates are somewhat indicative - helping to show when more data, or tweaked training parameters, seem to improve the vectors. But even vectors with small apparent accuracies on generic analogies might be useful elsewhere.
All that said, you can review a demo notebook like the gensim "Comparison of FastText and Word2Vec" to see what sorts of accuracies on the Google word2vec.c `questions-words.txt' analogy set (40-60%) are achieved under some simple defaults and relatively small training sets (100MB-1GB).

choosing kernel for digit recognition in C

I'm trying to classify digits read on images at known positions in C++, using SVM.
for that, I sample over a rectangle at the known position of the digit, I train with a ground_truth.
I wonder how to choose the kernel of the SVM. I use the default linear kernel but my intuition tell me that it might not be the best choice.
How could I choose the kernel?
You will need to tune the kernel (if you use a nonlinear one). This guide may be useful for you: A practical guide to SVM classification
Unfortunately there is not a magic bullet for this, so experimentation is your best friend.
Probably I would start with RBF which tends to work decently in most cases, and I am agreed with your intuition that probably linear is not the best, although some times (especially when you have tons of data) it can give you good surprises :)
The problem I have found with RBF is that it tends to overfit the training set, this stop to be an issue if you have a lot of data but then a new problem raises because it tends to scale poorly and having slow training time for big data.