Kapil Ahuja

Kapil Ahuja, Bryan K. Clark, Eric de Sturler et al.

Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are often used to calculate properties of many body quantum systems. The main cost of many QMC methods, for example the variational Monte Carlo (VMC) method, is in constructing a sequence of Slater matrices and computing the ratios of determinants for successive Slater matrices. Recent work has improved the scaling of constructing Slater matrices for insulators so that the cost of constructing Slater matrices in these systems is now linear in the number of particles, whereas computing determinant ratios remains cubic in the number of particles. With the long term aim of simulating much larger systems, we improve the scaling of computing the determinant ratios in the VMC method for simulating insulators by using preconditioned iterative solvers. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a method to efficiently compute for the Slater matrices a sequence of preconditioners that make the iterative solver converge rapidly. This involves cheap preconditioner updates, an effective reordering strategy, and a cheap method to monitor instability of ILUTP preconditioners. Using the resulting preconditioned iterative solvers to compute determinant ratios of consecutive Slater matrices reduces the scaling of QMC algorithms from O(n^3) per sweep to roughly O(n^2), where n is the number of particles, and a sweep is a sequence of n steps, each attempting to move a distinct particle. We demonstrate experimentally that we can achieve the improved scaling without increasing statistical errors. Our results show that preconditioned iterative solvers can dramatically reduce the cost of VMC for large(r) systems.

Kapil Ahuja, Eric de Sturler, Serkan Gugercin et al.

Science and engineering problems frequently require solving a sequence of dual linear systems. Besides having to store only few Lanczos vectors, using the BiConjugate Gradient method (BiCG) to solve dual linear systems has advantages for specific applications. For example, using BiCG to solve the dual linear systems arising in interpolatory model reduction provides a backward error formulation in the model reduction framework. Using BiCG to evaluate bilinear forms -- for example, in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for electronic structure calculations -- leads to a quadratic error bound. Since our focus is on sequences of dual linear systems, we introduce recycling BiCG, a BiCG method that recycles two Krylov subspaces from one pair of dual linear systems to the next pair. The derivation of recycling BiCG also builds the foundation for developing recycling variants of other bi-Lanczos based methods, such as CGS, BiCGSTAB, QMR, and TFQMR. We develop an augmented bi-Lanczos algorithm and a modified two-term recurrence to include recycling in the iteration. The recycle spaces are approximate left and right invariant subspaces corresponding to the eigenvalues closest to the origin. These recycle spaces are found by solving a small generalized eigenvalue problem alongside the dual linear systems being solved in the sequence. We test our algorithm in two application areas. First, we solve a discretized partial differential equation (PDE) of convection-diffusion type. Such a problem provides well-known test cases that are easy to test and analyze further. Second, we use recycling BiCG in the Iterative Rational Krylov Algorithm (IRKA) for interpolatory model reduction. IRKA requires solving sequences of slowly changing dual linear systems. We show up to 70% savings in iterations, and also demonstrate that for a model reduction problem BiCG takes (about) 50% more time than recycling BiCG.

Rajendra Choudhary, Kapil Ahuja

Bilinear dynamical systems are commonly used in science and engineering because they form a bridge between linear and non-linear systems. However, simulating them is still a challenge because of their large size. Hence, a lot of research is currently being done for reducing such bilinear dynamical systems (termed as bilinear model order reduction or bilinear MOR). Bilinear iterative rational Krylov algorithm (BIRKA) is a very popular, standard and mathematically sound algorithm for bilinear MOR, which is based upon interpolatory projection technique. An efficient variant of BIRKA, Truncated BIRKA (or TBIRKA) has also been recently proposed. Like for any MOR algorithm, these two algorithms also require solving multiple linear systems as part of the model reduction process. For reducing very large dynamical systems, which is now-a-days becoming a norm, scaling of such linear systems with respect to input dynamical system size is a bottleneck. For efficiency, these linear systems are often solved by an iterative solver, which introduces approximation errors. Hence, stability analysis of MOR algorithms with respect to inexact linear solves is important. In our past work, we have shown that under mild conditions, BIRKA is stable (in the sense as discussed above). Here, we look at stability of TBIRKA in the same context. Besides deriving the conditions for a stable TBIRKA, our other novel contribution is the more intuitive methodology for achieving this. This approach exploits the fact that in TBIRKA a bilinear dynamical system can be represented by a finite set of functions, which was not possible in BIRKA (because infinite such functions were needed there). The stability analysis techniques that we propose here can be extended to many other methods for doing MOR of bilinear dynamical systems, e.g., using balanced truncation or the ADI methods.

Navneet Pratap Singh, Kapil Ahuja, Heike Fassbender

Recently a new algorithm for model reduction of second order linear dynamical systems with proportional damping, the Adaptive Iterative Rational Global Arnoldi (AIRGA) algorithm, has been proposed. The main computational cost of the AIRGA algorithm is in solving a sequence of linear systems. These linear systems do change only slightly from one iteration step to the next. Here we focus on efficiently solving these systems by iterative methods and the choice of an appropriate preconditioner. We propose the use of relevant iterative algorithm and the Sparse Approximate Inverse (SPAI) preconditioner. A technique to cheaply update the SPAI preconditioner in each iteration step of the model order reduction process is given. Moreover, it is shown that under certain conditions the AIRGA algorithm is stable with respect to the error introduced by iterative methods. Our theory is illustrated by experiments. It is demonstrated that SPAI preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (CG) works well for model reduction of a one dimensional beam model with AIRGA algorithm. Moreover, the computation time of preconditioner with update is on an average 2/3 rd of the computation time of preconditioner without update. With average timings running into hours for very large systems, such savings are substantial.

Saurabh Saini, Kapil Ahuja, Thomas Wick et al.

Optimization is essential in deep learning. The foundational method upon which most optimizers are built is momentum-based stochastic gradient descent. However, it suffers from two key drawbacks. First, it has noisy and varying gradients, and second, it has an overshoot phenomenon. To address noisy gradients, Adam was proposed, which remains the most widely used adaptive optimizer. To address the overshoot phenomenon, a control-theory-based PID optimizer was proposed. To tackle both the limitations within a single framework, several variants of Adaptive PID (AdaPID) have recently been proposed. Although AdaPID performs well, it still inherits two critical drawbacks from Adam, namely convergence and stability issues. In this work, we address both these limitations. To fix the convergence issue, we uniquely integrate the idea of using a non-increasing effective learning rate into AdaPID (originally proposed in AMSGrad, an extension of Adam). To fix the stability issue, we innovatively integrate a gradient difference based modulation factor into AdaPID (originally proposed in DiffGrad, another extension of Adam). Combining both these ideas in AdaPID, results in our novel IAdaPID-ADG optimizer. We evaluate our proposed optimizer on multiple datasets, including benchmark datasets (MNIST and CIFAR10) and real-world datasets (IARC and AnnoCerv). The IAdaPID-ADG substantially outperforms all competing optimizers. Additionally, we perform an ablation study on the MNIST dataset to demonstrate the contribution of each added component.

Amit Raj, Kapil Ahuja, Yann Busnel

This paper explores the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques for generating the trajectories of fleets of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The two main challenges addressed include accurately predicting the paths of UAVs and efficiently avoiding collisions between them. Firstly, the paper systematically applies a diverse set of activation functions to a Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN) with a single hidden layer, which enhances the accuracy of the predicted path compared to previous work. Secondly, we introduce a novel activation function, AdaptoSwelliGauss, which is a sophisticated fusion of Swish and Elliott activations, seamlessly integrated with a scaled and shifted Gaussian component. Swish facilitates smooth transitions, Elliott captures abrupt trajectory changes, and the scaled and shifted Gaussian enhances robustness against noise. This dynamic combination is specifically designed to excel in capturing the complexities of UAV trajectory prediction. This new activation function gives substantially better accuracy than all existing activation functions. Thirdly, we propose a novel Integrated Collision Detection, Avoidance, and Batching (ICDAB) strategy that merges two complementary UAV collision avoidance techniques: changing UAV trajectories and altering their starting times, also referred to as batching. This integration helps overcome the disadvantages of both - reduction in the number of trajectory manipulations, which avoids overly convoluted paths in the first technique, and smaller batch sizes, which reduce overall takeoff time in the second.

Saurabh Saini, Kapil Ahuja, Marc C. Steinbach et al.

In this study, we develop a new CAD system for accurate thyroid cancer classification with emphasis on feature extraction. Prior studies have shown that thyroid texture is important for segregating the thyroid ultrasound images into different classes. Based upon our experience with breast cancer classification, we first conjuncture that the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is the best descriptor for capturing textural features. Thyroid ultrasound images are particularly challenging as the gland is surrounded by multiple complex anatomical structures leading to variations in tissue density. Hence, we second conjuncture the importance of localization and propose that the Local DCT (LDCT) descriptor captures the textural features best in this context. Another disadvantage of complex anatomy around the thyroid gland is scattering of ultrasound waves resulting in noisy and unclear textures. Hence, we third conjuncture that one image descriptor is not enough to fully capture the textural features and propose the integration of another popular texture capturing descriptor (Improved Local Binary Pattern, ILBP) with LDCT. ILBP is known to be noise resilient as well. We term our novel descriptor as Binary Pattern Driven Local Discrete Cosine Transform (BPD-LDCT). Final classification is carried out using a non-linear SVM. The proposed CAD system is evaluated on the only two publicly available thyroid cancer datasets, namely TDID and AUITD. The evaluation is conducted in two stages. In Stage I, thyroid nodules are categorized as benign or malignant. In Stage II, the malignant cases are further sub-classified into TI-RADS (4) and TI-RADS (5). For Stage I classification, our proposed model demonstrates exceptional performance of nearly 100% on TDID and 97% on AUITD. In Stage II classification, the proposed model again attains excellent classification of close to 100% on TDID and 99% on AUITD.

Priyanshu Singh, Kapil Ahuja

Hierarchical clustering remains a fundamental challenge in data mining, particularly when dealing with large-scale datasets where traditional approaches fail to scale effectively. Recent Chameleon-based algorithms - Chameleon2, M-Chameleon, and INNGS-Chameleon have proposed advanced strategies but they still suffer from $O(n^2)$ computational complexity, especially for large datasets. With Chameleon2 as the base algorithm, we introduce Chameleon2++ that addresses this challenge. Our algorithm has three parts. First, Graph Generation - we propose an approximate $k$-NN search instead of an exact one, specifically we integrate with the Annoy algorithm. This results in fast approximate nearest neighbor computation, significantly reducing the graph generation time. Second, Graph Partitioning - we propose use of a multi-level partitioning algorithm instead of a recursive bisection one. Specifically we adapt the hMETIS algorithm instead of the FM. This is because multi-level algorithms are robust to approximation introduced in the graph generation phase yielding higher-quality partitions, and that too with minimum configuration requirements. Third, Merging - we retain the flood fill heuristic that ensures connected balanced components in the partitions as well as efficient partition merging criteria leading to the final clusters. These enhancements reduce the overall time complexity to $O(n\log n)$, achieving scalability. On real-world benchmark datasets used in prior Chameleon works, Chameleon2++ delivers an average of 4% improvement in clustering quality. This demonstrates that algorithmic efficiency and clustering quality can co-exist in large-scale hierarchical clustering.

Saurabh Saini, Kapil Ahuja, Akshat S. Chauhan

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women and a leading cause of mortality. Many attempts have been made to develop an effective Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system; however, their performance remains limited. Using pretrained ResNet-50/101/152, we propose a novel CAD system that significantly outperforms prior approaches. Our novel model has three key components. First, we extract detailed features (color, edges, and texture) from early convolution blocks and the abstract features (shapes and objects) from later blocks, as both are equally important. This dual-level feature extraction is a new paradigm in cancer classification. Second, a non-parametric 3D attention module is uniquely embedded within each block for feature enhancement. Third, we design a theoretically motivated innovative adaptive pooling strategy for feature selection that applies Global Max Pooling to detailed features and Global Average Pooling to abstract features. These components form our Proposed Block-Fused Attention-Driven Adaptively-Pooled ResNet (BF-AD-AP-ResNet) model. To further strengthen learning, we introduce a Tri-Stream model, which unifies the enhanced features from three BF-AD-AP-ResNets. An SVM classifier is employed for final classification. We evaluate our models on two public datasets, IARC and AnnoCerv. On IARC, the base ResNets achieve an average performance of 90.91%, while our model achieves an excellent performance of 98.63%. On AnnoCerv, the base ResNets reach to 87.68%, and our model improves this significantly, reaching 93.39%. Our approach outperforms the best existing method on IARC by an average of 14.55%. For AnnoCerv, no prior competitive works are available. Additionally, we introduce a novel SHAP+LIME explainability method, accurately identifying the cancerous region in 97% of cases, ensuring model reliability for real-world use.

Kapil Ahuja, Mithun Singh, Kuldeep Pathak et al.

Clustering species of the same plant into different groups is an important step in developing new species of the concerned plant. Phenotypic (or physical) characteristics of plant species are commonly used to perform clustering. Hierarchical Clustering (HC) is popularly used for this task, and this algorithm suffers from low accuracy. In one of the recent works (Shastri et al., 2021), the authors have used the standard Spectral Clustering (SC) algorithm to improve the clustering accuracy. They have demonstrated the efficacy of their algorithm on soybean species. In the SC algorithm, one of the crucial steps is building the similarity matrix. A Gaussian similarity function is the standard choice to build this matrix. In the past, many works have proposed variants of the Gaussian similarity function to improve the performance of the SC algorithm, however, all have focused on the variance or scaling of the Gaussian. None of the past works have investigated upon the choice of base "e" (Euler's number) of the Gaussian similarity function (natural exponential function). Based upon spectral graph theory, specifically the Cheeger's inequality, in this work we propose use of a base "a" exponential function as the similarity function. We also integrate this new approach with the notion of "local scaling" from one of the first works that experimented with the scaling of the Gaussian similarity function (Zelnik-Manor et al., 2004). Using an eigenvalue analysis, we theoretically justify that our proposed algorithm should work better than the existing one. With evaluation on 2376 soybean species and 1865 rice species, we experimentally demonstrate that our new SC is 35% and 11% better than the standard SC, respectively.

Rohit Agrawal, Kapil Ahuja, Marc C. Steinbach et al.

We hide grayscale secret images into a grayscale cover image, which is considered to be a challenging steganography problem. Our goal is to develop a steganography scheme with enhanced embedding capacity while preserving the visual quality of the stego-image as well as the extracted secret image, and ensuring that the stego-image is resistant to steganographic attacks. The novel embedding rule of our scheme helps to hide secret image sparse coefficients into the oversampled cover image sparse coefficients in a staggered manner. The stego-image is constructed by using ADMM to solve the LASSO formulation of the underlying minimization problem. Finally, the secret images are extracted from the constructed stego-image using the reverse of our embedding rule. Using these components together, to achieve the above mentioned competing goals, forms our most novel contribution. We term our scheme SABMIS (Sparse Approximation Blind Multi-Image Steganography). We perform extensive experiments on several standard images. By choosing the size of the secret images to be half of the of cover image, we obtain embedding capacities of 2 bpp (bits per pixel), 4 bpp, 6 bpp, and 8 bpp while embedding one, two, three, and four secret images, respectively. Our focus is on hiding multiple secret images. For the case of hiding two and three secret images, our embedding capacities are higher than all the embedding capacities obtained in the literature until now. For the case of hiding four secret images, although our capacity is slightly lower than one work, we do better on the other two goals; a) very little deterioration in the quality of the stego-images and extracted secret images, and b) inherently and designed-to-be resistant to steganographic attacks. Additionally, we demonstrate that SABMIS executes in few minutes, and show its application on two real-life problems.

Seemandhar Jain, Aditya A. Shastri, Kapil Ahuja et al.

Clustering large amount of data is becoming increasingly important in the current times. Due to the large sizes of data, clustering algorithm often take too much time. Sampling this data before clustering is commonly used to reduce this time. In this work, we propose a probabilistic sampling technique called cube sampling along with K-Prototype clustering. Cube sampling is used because of its accurate sample selection. K-Prototype is most frequently used clustering algorithm when the data is numerical as well as categorical (very common in today's time). The novelty of this work is in obtaining the crucial inclusion probabilities for cube sampling using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Experiments on multiple datasets from the UCI repository demonstrate that cube sampled K-Prototype algorithm gives the best clustering accuracy among similarly sampled other popular clustering algorithms (K-Means, Hierarchical Clustering (HC), Spectral Clustering (SC)). When compared with unsampled K-Prototype, K-Means, HC and SC, it still has the best accuracy with the added advantage of reduced computational complexity (due to reduced data size).

Rohit Agrawal, Kapil Ahuja

Image steganography plays a vital role in securing secret data by embedding it in the cover images. Usually, these images are communicated in a compressed format. Existing techniques achieve this but have low embedding capacity. Enhancing this capacity causes a deterioration in the visual quality of the stego-image. Hence, our goal here is to enhance the embedding capacity while preserving the visual quality of the stego-image. We also intend to ensure that our scheme is resistant to steganalysis attacks. This paper proposes a Compressed Sensing Image Steganography (CSIS) scheme to achieve our goal while embedding binary data in images. The novelty of our scheme is the combination of three components in attaining the above-listed goals. First, we use compressed sensing to sparsify cover image block-wise, obtain its linear measurements, and then uniquely select permissible measurements. Further, before embedding the secret data, we encrypt it using the Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, and finally, we embed two bits of encrypted data into each permissible measurement. Second, we propose a novel data extraction technique, which is lossless and completely recovers our secret data. Third, for the reconstruction of the stego-image, we use the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) for the resultant optimization problem. We perform experiments on several standard grayscale images and a color image, and evaluate embedding capacity, PSNR value, mean SSIM index, NCC coefficients, and entropy. We achieve 1.53 times more embedding capacity as compared to the most recent scheme. We obtain an average of 37.92 dB PSNR value, and average values close to 1 for both the mean SSIM index and the NCC coefficients, which are considered good. Moreover, the entropy of cover images and their corresponding stego-images are nearly the same.

Aditya A. Shastri, Kapil Ahuja, Milind B. Ratnaparkhe et al.

Clustering genotypes based upon their phenotypic characteristics is used to obtain diverse sets of parents that are useful in their breeding programs. The Hierarchical Clustering (HC) algorithm is the current standard in clustering of phenotypic data. This algorithm suffers from low accuracy and high computational complexity issues. To address the accuracy challenge, we propose the use of Spectral Clustering (SC) algorithm. To make the algorithm computationally cheap, we propose using sampling, specifically, Pivotal Sampling that is probability based. Since application of samplings to phenotypic data has not been explored much, for effective comparison, another sampling technique called Vector Quantization (VQ) is adapted for this data as well. VQ has recently given promising results for genome data. The novelty of our SC with Pivotal Sampling algorithm is in constructing the crucial similarity matrix for the clustering algorithm and defining probabilities for the sampling technique. Although our algorithm can be applied to any plant genotypes, we test it on the phenotypic data obtained from about 2400 Soybean genotypes. SC with Pivotal Sampling achieves substantially more accuracy (in terms of Silhouette Values) than all the other proposed competitive clustering with sampling algorithms (i.e. SC with VQ, HC with Pivotal Sampling, and HC with VQ). The complexities of our SC with Pivotal Sampling algorithm and these three variants are almost same because of the involved sampling. In addition to this, SC with Pivotal Sampling outperforms the standard HC algorithm in both accuracy and computational complexity. We experimentally show that we are up to 45% more accurate than HC in terms of clustering accuracy. The computational complexity of our algorithm is more than a magnitude lesser than HC.

Aditya A. Shastri, Kapil Ahuja, Milind B. Ratnaparkhe et al.

We develop a Vector Quantized Spectral Clustering (VQSC) algorithm that is a combination of Spectral Clustering (SC) and Vector Quantization (VQ) sampling for grouping Soybean genomes. The inspiration here is to use SC for its accuracy and VQ to make the algorithm computationally cheap (the complexity of SC is cubic in-terms of the input size). Although the combination of SC and VQ is not new, the novelty of our work is in developing the crucial similarity matrix in SC as well as use of k-medoids in VQ, both adapted for the Soybean genome data. We compare our approach with commonly used techniques like UPGMA (Un-weighted Pair Graph Method with Arithmetic Mean) and NJ (Neighbour Joining). Experimental results show that our approach outperforms both these techniques significantly in terms of cluster quality (up to 25% better cluster quality) and time complexity (order of magnitude faster).

Navneet Pratap Singh, Kapil Ahuja

The main computational cost of algorithms for computing reduced-order models of parametric dynamical systems is in solving sequences of very large and sparse linear systems. We focus on efficiently solving these linear systems, arising while reducing second-order linear dynamical systems, by iterative methods with appropriate preconditioners. We propose that the choice of underlying iterative solver is problem dependent. We propose the use of block variant of the underlying iterative method because often all right-hand-side are available together. Since, Sparse Approximate Inverse (SPAI) preconditioner is a general preconditioner that can be naturally parallelized, we propose its use. Our most novel contribution is a technique to cheaply update the SPAI preconditioner, while solving the parametrically changing linear systems. We support our proposed theory by numerical experiments where we first show benefit of 80% in time by using a block iterative method, and a benefit of 70% in time by using SPAI updates.

Chandan Gautam, Ramesh Balaji, K Sudharsan et al.

Multi-kernel learning has been well explored in the recent past and has exhibited promising outcomes for multi-class classification and regression tasks. In this paper, we present a multiple kernel learning approach for the One-class Classification (OCC) task and employ it for anomaly detection. Recently, the basic multi-kernel approach has been proposed to solve the OCC problem, which is simply a convex combination of different kernels with equal weights. This paper proposes a Localized Multiple Kernel learning approach for Anomaly Detection (LMKAD) using OCC, where the weight for each kernel is assigned locally. Proposed LMKAD approach adapts the weight for each kernel using a gating function. The parameters of the gating function and one-class classifier are optimized simultaneously through a two-step optimization process. We present the empirical results of the performance of LMKAD on 25 benchmark datasets from various disciplines. This performance is evaluated against existing Multi Kernel Anomaly Detection (MKAD) algorithm, and four other existing kernel-based one-class classifiers to showcase the credibility of our approach. Our algorithm achieves significantly better Gmean scores while using a lesser number of support vectors compared to MKAD. Friedman test is also performed to verify the statistical significance of the results claimed in this paper.

Rajendra Choudhary, Kapil Ahuja

Models coming from different physical applications are very large in size. Simulation with such systems is expensive so one usually obtains a reduced model (by model reduction) that replicates the input-output behaviour of the original full model. A recently proposed algorithm for model reduction of bilinear dynamical systems, Bilinear Iterative Rational Krylov Algorithm (BIRKA), does so in a locally optimal way. This algorithm requires solving very large linear systems of equations. Usually these systems are solved by direct methods (e.g., LU), which are very expensive. A better choice is iterative methods (e.g., Krylov). However, iterative methods introduce errors in linear solves because they are not exact. They solve the given linear system up to a certain tolerance. We prove that under some mild assumptions BIRKA is stable with respect to the error introduced by the inexact linear solves. We also analyze the accuracy of the reduced system obtained from using these inexact solves and support all our results by numerical experiments.

Chandan Gautam, Aruna Tiwari, Sundaram Suresh et al.

This paper presents an online learning with regularized kernel based one-class extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier and is referred as online RK-OC-ELM. The baseline kernel hyperplane model considers whole data in a single chunk with regularized ELM approach for offline learning in case of one-class classification (OCC). Further, the basic hyper plane model is adapted in an online fashion from stream of training samples in this paper. Two frameworks viz., boundary and reconstruction are presented to detect the target class in online RKOC-ELM. Boundary framework based one-class classifier consists of single node output architecture and classifier endeavors to approximate all data to any real number. However, one-class classifier based on reconstruction framework is an autoencoder architecture, where output nodes are identical to input nodes and classifier endeavor to reconstruct input layer at the output layer. Both these frameworks employ regularized kernel ELM based online learning and consistency based model selection has been employed to select learning algorithm parameters. The performance of online RK-OC-ELM has been evaluated on standard benchmark datasets as well as on artificial datasets and the results are compared with existing state-of-the art one-class classifiers. The results indicate that the online learning one-class classifier is slightly better or same as batch learning based approaches. As, base classifier used for the proposed classifiers are based on the ELM, hence, proposed classifiers would also inherit the benefit of the base classifier i.e. it will perform faster computation compared to traditional autoencoder based one-class classifier.

Aditya A. Shastri, Deepti Tamrakar, Kapil Ahuja

Breast cancer is becoming pervasive with each passing day. Hence, its early detection is a big step in saving the life of any patient. Mammography is a common tool in breast cancer diagnosis. The most important step here is classification of mammogram patches as normal-abnormal and benign-malignant. Texture of a breast in a mammogram patch plays a significant role in these classifications. We propose a variation of Histogram of Gradients (HOG) and Gabor filter combination called Histogram of Oriented Texture (HOT) that exploits this fact. We also revisit the Pass Band - Discrete Cosine Transform (PB-DCT) descriptor that captures texture information well. All features of a mammogram patch may not be useful. Hence, we apply a feature selection technique called Discrimination Potentiality (DP). Our resulting descriptors, DP-HOT and DP-PB-DCT, are compared with the standard descriptors. Density of a mammogram patch is important for classification, and has not been studied exhaustively. The Image Retrieval in Medical Application (IRMA) database from RWTH Aachen, Germany is a standard database that provides mammogram patches, and most researchers have tested their frameworks only on a subset of patches from this database. We apply our two new descriptors on all images of the IRMA database for density wise classification, and compare with the standard descriptors. We achieve higher accuracy than all of the existing standard descriptors (more than 92%).