AMS2007 Asia Modelling Symposium 2007

27 – 30 March 2007, Prince of Songkla University, Phuket, Thailand

Keynote Speaker

ROUGH-FUZZY GRANULATION, ROUGH ENTROPY AND IMAGE SEGMENTATION

Sankar K. Pal, Director, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta 700 108, India, sankar@isical.ac.in

ABSTRACT

This talk has two parts explaining the significance of Rough sets in granular computing in terms of rough set rules and in uncertainty handling in terms of lower and upper approximations. The first part describes how the concept of rough-fuzzy granulation can be used for the problem of case generation, with varying reduced number of features, in a case based reasoning framework, and their application to multi-spectral image segmentation. Here the synergistic integration of EM algorithm, minimal spanning tree and rough set theoretic knowledge encoding via information granules provides efficient segmentation (in terms of computation time, uncertainty handling and quantitative index). The second part deals with devising a new definition of image entropy in a rough set theoretic framework, and its application to the problem of object extraction from images by minimizing both object and background roughness. Granules carry local information and reflect the inherent spatial relation of the image by treating pixels of a window as indiscernible or homogeneous. Maximization of homogeneity in both object and background regions during their partitioning is achieved through maximization of rough entropy; thereby providing optimum results for object background classification. The effect of granule size is also discussed.

Key Words: Rough image entropy, knowledge mining, soft computing, granular computing, EM algorithm, minimal spanning tree, multi-spectral image segmentation

Sankar K. Pal is the Director and a Distinguished Scientist of the Indian Statistical Institute. He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit, and the Soft Computing Research Center: A National Facility in the Institute in Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. in Radio Physics and Electronics from the University of Calcutta in 1979, and another Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering along with DIC from Imperial College, University of London in 1982.

He worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986-87; the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas in 1990-92 & 1994; and in US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC in 2004. Since 1997 he has been serving as a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (USA) for the Asia-Pacific Region, and held several visiting positions in Hong Kong and Australian universities.

Prof. Pal is a Fellow of the IEEE, USA, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), Italy, International Association for Pattern Recognition, USA, and all the four National Academies for Science/ Engineering in India. He is a co-author of fourteen books and about three hundred research publications in the areas of Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Image Processing, Data Mining and Web Intelligence, Soft Computing, Bioinformatics Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, Fuzzy Sets, Rough Sets, and Bioinformatics.

He has received the 1990 S.S. Bhatnagar Prize (which is the most coveted award for a scientist in India), and many prestigious awards in India and abroad including the 1999 G.D. Birla Award, 1998 Om Bhasin Award, 1993 Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, 2000 Khwarizmi International Award from the Islamic Republic of Iran, 2000-2001 FICCI Award, 1993 Vikram Sarabhai Research Award, 1993 NASA Tech Brief Award (USA), 1994 IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award (USA), 1995 NASA Patent Application Award (USA), 2005-06 Indian Science Congress- P.C. Mahalanobis Birth Centenary Award (Gold Medal) for Lifetime Achievement, 1997 IETE-R.L. Wadhwa Gold Medal, and the 2001 INSA-S.H. Zaheer Medal.

Prof. Pal is acting/acted as an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2002-06), IEEE Trans. Neural Networks (1994-98, 2003-06), Pattern Recognition Letters, Int. J. Pattern Recognition and Artoficial Intelligence, Neurocomputing (1995-2005), Applied Intelligence, Information Sciences, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Fundamenta Informaticae, Int. J. Computational Intelligence and Applications, and Proc. INSA-A; a Member, Executive Advisory Editorial Board, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Systems, Int. Journal on Image and Graphics, and Int. Journal of Approximate Reasoning; and a Guest Editor of IEEE Computer.