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pyDML is an open-source python library that provides a wide range of distance metric learning algorithms. Distance metric learning can be useful to improve similarity learning algorithms, such as the nearest neighbors classifier, and also has other applications, like dimensionality reduction. The pyDML package currently provides more than 20 algorithms, which can be categorized, according to their purpose, in: dimensionality reduction algorithms, algorithms to improve nearest neighbors or nearest centroids classifiers, information theory based algorithms or kernel based algorithms, among others. In addition, the library also provides some utilities for the visualization of classifier regions, parameter tuning and a stats website with the performance of the implemented algorithms. The package relies on the scipy ecosystem, it is fully compatible with scikit-learn, and is distributed under GPLv3 license. Source code and documentation can be found at https://github.com/jlsuarezdiaz/pyDML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensembles, especially ensembles of decision trees, are one of the most popular and successful techniques in machine learning. Recently, the number of ensemble-based proposals has grown steadily. Therefore, it is necessary to identify which are the appropriate algorithms for a certain problem. In this paper, we aim to help practitioners to choose the best ensemble technique according to their problem characteristics and their workflow. To do so, we revise the most renowned bagging and boosting algorithms and their software tools. These ensembles are described in detail within their variants and improvements available in the literature. Their online-available software tools are reviewed attending to the implemented versions and features. They are categorized according to their supported programming languages and computing paradigms. The performance of 14 different bagging and boosting based ensembles, including XGBoost, LightGBM and Random Forest, is empirically analyzed in terms of predictive capability and efficiency. This comparison is done under the same software environment with 76 different classification tasks. Their predictive capabilities are evaluated with a wide variety of scenarios, such as standard multi-class problems, scenarios with categorical features and big size data. The efficiency of these methods is analyzed with considerably large data-sets. Several practical perspectives and opportunities are also exposed for ensemble learning. • We present an overview of recent and iconic bagging and boosting based algorithms. • We list their software tools available online and features. • We perform a performance study, extracting some lessons learned. • Some perspectives on ensemble learning are discussed. • Some opportunities and future fields are examined for ensembles in machine learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • This paper proposes a novel binocular image approach that makes the detection model focus on the area of interest. • We built a low cost symmetric dual camera system to compute the disparity map and exploit that information to improve the selection of candidate regions in the input frames. • The proposed approach reduces the number of false positives in the test videos by 49.47%. Abstract Object detection models have known important improvements in the recent years. The state-of-the art detectors are end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network based models that reach good mean average precisions, around 73%, on benchmarks of high quality images. However, these models still produce a large number of false positives in low quality videos such as, surveillance videos. This paper proposes a novel image fusion approach to make the detection model focus on the area of interest where the action is more likely to happen in the scene. We propose building a low cost symmetric dual camera system to compute the disparity map and exploit this information to improve the selection of candidate regions from the input frames. From our results, the proposed approach not only reduces the number of false positives but also improves the overall performance of the detection model which make it appropriate for object detection in surveillance videos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Study the performance of promising CNNs in the classification of coral texture images. • Analyze different types of transfer learning. • Analyze data augmentation on the performance of the coral classification model. • Experimental results outperform state-of-the-art methods needing human intervention. • Generalize the best approach to other coral texture datasets. Graphical abstract Abstract The recognition of coral species based on underwater texture images poses a significant difficulty for machine learning algorithms, due to the three following challenges embedded in the nature of this data: (1) datasets do not include information about the global structure of the coral; (2) several species of coral have very similar characteristics; and (3) defining the spatial borders between classes is difficult as many corals tend to appear together in groups. For this reasons, the classification of coral species has always required an aid from a domain expert. The objective of this paper is to develop an accurate classification model for coral texture images. Current datasets contain a large number of imbalanced classes, while the images are subject to inter-class variation. We have focused on the current small datasets and analyzed (1) several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, (2) data augmentation techniques and (3) transfer learning approaches. We have achieved the state-of-the art accuracies using different variations of ResNet on the two small coral texture datasets, EILAT and RSMAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In classification, noise may deteriorate the system performance and increase the complexity of the models built. In order to mitigate its consequences, several approaches have been proposed in the literature. Among them, noise filtering, which removes noisy examples from the training data, is one of the most used techniques. This paper proposes a new noise filtering method that combines several filtering strategies in order to increase the accuracy of the classification algorithms used after the filtering process. The filtering is based on the fusion of the predictions of several classifiers used to detect the presence of noise. We translate the idea behind multiple classifier systems, where the information gathered from different models is combined, to noise filtering. In this way, we consider the combination of classifiers instead of using only one to detect noise. Additionally, the proposed method follows an iterative noise filtering scheme that allows us to avoid the usage of detected noisy examples in each new iteration of the filtering process. Finally, we introduce a noisy score to control the filtering sensitivity, in such a way that the amount of noisy examples removed in each iteration can be adapted to the necessities of the practitioner. The first two strategies (use of multiple classifiers and iterative filtering) are used to improve the filtering accuracy, whereas the last one (the noisy score) controls the level of conservation of the filter removing potentially noisy examples. The validity of the proposed method is studied in an exhaustive experimental study. We compare the new filtering method against several state-of-the-art methods to deal with datasets with class noise and study their efficacy in three classifiers with different sensitivity to noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]