CSSE Seminar Series (CSSESS)

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Computer vision is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the automated processing and analysis of images from the real world. The applications range from simple edge detection tasks to complex robot vision tasks. Due to the large search space and noise environments, solving vision tasks has been very challenging. Over the last decade there has been increasing interest in using evolutionary computation techniques to solve vision problems. This talk will discuss the use of genetic and evolutionary techniques such as genetic programming, particle swarm optimisation and learning classifier systems to solve vision and image processing problems particularly image classification and edge detection tasks. Several real world applications in automatic object tracking, edge detection, face recognition and adaptive digit recognition will also be discussed. A key characteristic of this approach to these challenging problems is that one can usually obtain exciting results without needing to develop complex mathematical models.

Mengjie Zhang is currently a Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he heads the interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation Research Group. He is a member of the University Postgraduate Scholarships Committee, a member of the Faculty of Graduate Research Board at the University, Deputy Head of School of Engineering and Computer Science, and Chair of the Research Committee of the School. His research is mainly focused on evolutionary computation, particularly genetic programming, particle swarm optimisation and learning classifier systems with application areas of computer vision and image processing, job shop scheduling, multi-objective optimisation, classification with unbalanced data, and feature selection and dimension reduction for classification with high dimensions. He is also interested in data mining, machine learning, and web information extraction. Prof Zhang has published over 200 academic papers in refereed international journals and conferences in these areas. He has been serving as an associated editor or editorial board member for five international journals including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, the Evolutionary Computation Journal (MIT Press) and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Springer), and as a reviewer of over 15 international journals. He has been a program/technical/special session co-chair for five international conferences. He has also been serving as a steering committee member and a program committee member for over 80 international conferences including all major conferences in evolutionary computation. Since 2007, he has been listed as one of the top ten international genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/gp-html/index.html). Prof Zhang is a senior member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee, a member of IEEE CIS Intelligent System Applications Technical Committee, a vice-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and a committee member of the IEEE New Zealand Central Section. He has been a main organizer of the special session of Evolutionary Computer Vision at IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation since 2005.

Further Information: http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~mengjie/, http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Groups/ECRG/

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