Genetic algorithms and deep learning for automatic painter classification

In this paper we describe the problem of painter classification, and propose a novel hybrid approach incorporating genetic algorithms (GA) and deep restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM). Given a painting, we extract features using both generic image processing (IP) functions (e.g., fractal dimension, Fourier spectra coefficients, texture coefficients, etc.) and unsupervised deep learning (using deep RBMs). We subsequently compare several supervised learning techniques for classification using the extracted features as input. The results show that the weighted nearest neighbor (WNN) method, for which the weights are evolved using GA, outperforms both a support vector machine (SVM) classifier and a standard nearest neighbor classifier, achieving over 90% classification accuracy for the 3-painter problem (an improvement of over 10% relatively to previous results due to standard feature extraction only)