Baseline fusion for image an pattern recognition - what not to do (and how to do better)
Abstract
The ever-increasing demand for a reliable inference capable of handling unpredictable challenges of practical application in the real world has made research on information fusion of major importance; indeed, this challenge is pervasive in a whole range of image understanding tasks. In the development of the most common type—score-level fusion algorithms—it is virtually universally desirable to have as a reference starting point a simple and universally sound baseline benchmark which newly developed approaches can be compared to. One of the most pervasively used methods is that of weighted linear fusion. It has cemented itself as the default off-the-shelf baseline owing to its simplicity of implementation, interpretability, and surprisingly competitive performance across a widest range of application domains and information source types. In this paper I argue that despite this track record, weighted linear fusion is not a good baseline on the grounds that there is an equally simple and interpretable alternative—namely quadratic mean-based fusion—which is theoretically more principled and which is more successful in practice. I argue the former from first principles and demonstrate the latter using a series of experiments on a diverse set of fusion problems: classification using synthetically generated data, computer vision-based object recognition, arrhythmia detection, and fatality prediction in motor vehicle accidents. On all of the aforementioned problems and in all instances, the proposed fusion approach exhibits superior performance over linear fusion, often increasing class separation by several orders of magnitude.
Citation
Arandelovic , O 2017 , ' Baseline fusion for image an pattern recognition - what not to do (and how to do better) ' , Journal of Imaging , vol. 3 , no. 4 , 44 , pp. 1-16 . https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging3040044
Publication
Journal of Imaging
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2313-433XType
Journal article
Rights
Copyright the Author 2017. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
Description
(Special issue on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition).Collections
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