Introduction to Pattern

Recognition
Chapter 1 (Duda et al.)

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Text

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What is a Pattern?

• A pattern could be an object or event.

biometric patterns hand gesture patterns

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What is Pattern Recognition?

• Assign an unknown pattern to one of several known categories (or

classes).

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What is a Pattern? (con’t)
• Loan/Credit card applications
• Income, # of dependents, mortgage amount  credit worthiness
classification.

• Dating services
• Age, hobbies, income “desirability” classification

• Web documents
• Key-word based descriptions (e.g., documents containing “football”,
“NFL”)  document classification.

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Pattern Class
• A collection of “similar” objects.

Female Male

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How do we model a Pattern Class?
• Typically, using a statistical model.
• probability density function (e.g., Gaussian)

male
Gender Classification female

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How do we model a Pattern Class?
(cont’d)

• Key challenges:

• Intra-class variability

The letter “T” in different typefaces

• Inter-class variability

Letters/Numbers that look similar

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Pattern Recognition:
Main Objectives
• Hypothesize the models that describe each pattern
class (e.g., recover the process that generated the
patterns).

• Given a novel pattern, choose the best-fitting

model for it and then assign it to the pattern class
associated with the model.

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Classification vs Clustering
• Classification (known categories)
• Clustering (unknown categories)

Category “A”

Category “B”

Clustering
Classification (Recognition) (Unsupervised Classification)
(Supervised Classification)
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Pattern Recognition
Applications

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Handwriting Recognition

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Handwriting Recognition (cont’d)

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License Plate Recognition

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Biometric Recognition

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Fingerprint Classification

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Face Detection

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Gender Classification

Balanced classes (i.e., male vs female)

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Autonomous Systems

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Medical Applications

Skin Cancer Detection Breast Cancer Detection

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Land Classification
(from aerial or satellite images)

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 “Hot” Applications
• Recommendation systems
• Amazon, Netflix

• Targeted advertising

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The Netflix Prize

• Predict how much someone is going to enjoy a

movie based on their movie preferences.
• $1M awarded in Sept. 2009

• Can software recommend movies to customers?

• Not Rambo to Woody Allen fans
• Not Saw VI if you’ve seen all previous Saw movies

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Main Classification Approaches
x: input vector (pattern)

y: class label (class)

•Generative
– Model the joint probability, p(x, y)
– Make predictions by using Bayes rules to calculate p(ylx)
– Pick the most likely label y

•Discriminative
– Estimate p(ylx) directly (e.g., learn a direct map from inputs x to the
class labels y)
– Pick the most likely label y

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Complexity of PR – An Example

Problem: Sorting
incoming fish on a
conveyor belt.

Assumption: Two
kind of fish:
(1) sea bass
(2) salmon

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Pre-processing Step

Example

(1) Image enhancement

(2) Separate touching

or occluding fish

(3) Find the boundary of

each fish

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Feature Extraction
• Assume a fisherman told us that a sea bass is
generally longer than a salmon.

• We can use length as a feature and decide

between sea bass and salmon according to a
threshold on length.

• How should we choose the threshold?

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“Length” Histograms

threshold l*

• Even though sea bass is longer than salmon on

the average, there are many examples of fish
where this observation does not hold.

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“Average Lightness” Histograms
• Consider a different feature such as “average
lightness”

threshold x*
• It seems easier to choose the threshold x* but we
still cannot make a perfect decision.
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Multiple Features
• To improve recognition accuracy, we might have to
use more than one features at a time.
• Single features might not yield the best performance.
• Using combinations of features might yield better
performance.

 x1  x1 : lightness
 x  x : width
 2 2
• How many features should we choose?

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Classification
• Partition the feature space into two regions by
finding the decision boundary that minimizes the
error.

• How should we find the optimal decision boundary?

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PR System – Two Phases
Test Phase Training Phase

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 Sensors & Preprocessing
• Sensing:
• Use a sensor (camera or microphone) for data capture.
• PR depends on bandwidth, resolution, sensitivity, distortion of the sensor.

• Pre-processing:
• Removal of noise in data.
• Segmentation (i.e., isolation of patterns of interest from background).

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Training/Test data
• How do we know that we have collected an adequately large and
representative set of examples for training/testing the system?

Training Set Test Set ?

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 Feature Extraction
• How to choose a good set of features?
• Discriminative features

• Invariant features (e.g., translation, rotation and scale)

• Are there ways to automatically learn which features are best ?

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How Many Features?
• Does adding more features always improve performance?
• It might be difficult and computationally expensive to extract certain
features.
• Correlated features might not improve performance.
• “Curse” of dimensionality.

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Curse of Dimensionality
• Adding too many features can, paradoxically, lead to a
worsening of performance.
• Divide each of the input features into a number of intervals, so that
the value of a feature can be specified approximately by saying in
which interval it lies.

• If each input feature is divided into M divisions, then the total

number of cells is Md (d: # of features).
• Since each cell must contain at least one point, the number of
training data grows exponentially with d.

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Missing Features
• Certain features might be missing (e.g., due to occlusion).
• How should we train the classifier with missing features ?
• How should the classifier make the best decision with missing
features ?

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Complexity
• We can get perfect classification performance on the
training data by choosing complex models.
• Complex models are tuned to the particular training
samples, rather than on the characteristics of the true
model.

overfitting

How well can the model generalize to unknown samples?

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Generalization
• Generalization is defined as the ability of a classifier to
produce correct results on novel patterns.
• How can we improve generalization performance ?
• More training examples (i.e., better model estimates).
• Simpler models usually yield better performance.

complex model simpler model

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More on model complexity
• Consider the following 10 sample points (blue circles)
assuming some noise.
• Green curve is the true function that generated the
data.

• Approximate the true function from the sample points.

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More on model complexity
(cont’d)
Polynomial curve fitting: polynomials having various
orders, shown as red curves, fitted to the set of 10 sample
points.

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More on complexity (cont’d)
Polynomial curve fitting: 9’th order polynomials fitted to
15 and 100 sample points.

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 Ensembles of Classifiers
• Performance can be improved using a
"pool" of classifiers.

• How should we build and combine

different classifiers ?

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 PR System (cont’d)
• Post-processing:
• Exploit context to improve performance.

How m ch info mation are

y u mi sing?

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Cost of miss-classifications

• Consider the fish classification example; there

are two possible classification errors:

(1) Deciding the fish was a sea bass when it was a

salmon.
(2) Deciding the fish was a salmon when it was a sea
bass.

• Are both errors equally important ?

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Cost of miss-classifications (cont’d)

• Suppose the fish packing company knows that:

• Customers who buy salmon will object vigorously if
they see sea bass in their cans.
• Customers who buy sea bass will not be unhappy if
they occasionally see some expensive salmon in their
cans.

• How does this knowledge affect our decision?

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Computational Complexity
• How does an algorithm scale with the number of:
• features
• patterns
• categories
• Consider tradeoffs between computational complexity and
performance.

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Would it be possible to build a
“general purpose” PR system?
• Humans have the ability to switch rapidly and
seamlessly between different pattern recognition
tasks.
• It is very difficult to design a system that is capable
of performing a variety of classification tasks.
• Different decision tasks may require different features.
• Different features might yield different solutions.
• Different tradeoffs exist for different tasks.

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