Object detection using neural networks and genetic programming

This paper describes a domain independent approach to the use of neural networks (NNs) and genetic programming (GP) for object detection problems. Instead of using high level features for a particular task, this approach uses domain independent pixel statistics for object detection. The paper first compares an NN method and a GP method on four image data sets providing object detection problems of increasing difficulty. The results show that the GP method performs better than the NN method on these problems but still produces a large number of false alarms on the difficult problem and computation cost is still high. To deal with these problems, we develop a new method called GP-refine that uses a two stage learning process. The new GP method further improves object detection performance on the difficult detection task.