abstract = "Feature extraction, as one essential step of image
classification, can potentially reduce image data
dimensionality and capture effective information for
improving performance. However, most existing image
descriptors are designed to conduct specific tasks and
might not be sufficient for different types of images.
Genetic programming (GP) can automatically extract
multiple important and discriminative features by
incorporating diverse image descriptors into a GP
program. Furthermore, different regions in an image
have different structural characteristics. In this
paper, we propose a region adaptive image
classification approach based on GP, which can
automatically extract informative image features by
automatically applying different image descriptors in
different regions of an image. A new flexible GP
program structure with a new function set and a new
terminal set is developed in this approach. The
performance of the proposed method is evaluated on four
various data sets and compared with other
state-of-the-art classification methods. Experimental
results illustrate that the proposed approach is
capable of achieving better or competitive performance
than these baseline methods. Further analysis of some
good programs shows the high interpretability of the
proposed method.",