The success of Deep Learning models, notably convolutional neural networks (CNNs), makes them the favorable solution for object recognition systems in both visible and infrared domains. However, the lack of training data in the case of maritime ships research leads to poor performance due to the problem of overfitting. In addition, the back-propagation algorithm used to train CNN is very slow and requires tuning many hyperparameters. To overcome these weaknesses, we introduce a new approach fully based on Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) to learn useful CNN features and perform a fast and accurate classification, which is suitable for infrared-based recognition systems. The proposed approach combines an ELM based learning algorithm to train CNN for discriminative features extraction and an ELM based ensemble for classification. The experimental results on VAIS dataset, which is the largest dataset of maritime ships, confirm that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models in term of generalization performance and training speed. For instance, the proposed model is up to 950 times faster than the traditional back-propagation based training of convolutional neural networks, primarily for low-level features extraction.

Image registration and photo-mosaicing of related imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is an active research topic. Aerial photography and mosaicing became crucial for surveillance and reconnaissance. It consists in aligning multiple images to construct a single large image of a 3D scene allowing the operator to view images that offers a wider field of view than standard images. Offline registration and mosaicing of collected images from UAVs has proven to give great results but is numerically intensive and somewhat slow. In this paper, a new approach for real time mosaicing is proposed based on new registration approach which reduces accumulated error and distortion of the current image. A quantitative analysis of the new approach is performed. This analysis allows the comparison of two images mosaic using some parameters to evaluate the quality, the Distortion rate and the speed of mosaicing.

Regression, as a particular task of machine learning, performs a vital part in data-driven modeling, by finding the connections between the system state variables without any explicit knowledge about the system, using a collection of input-output data. To enhance the prediction performance and maximize the training speed, we propose a fully learnable ensemble of Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) for regression. The developed approach learns the combination of different individual models, using the ELM algorithm, which is applied to minimize both the prediction error and the norm of the network parameters, which leads to higher generalization performance under Bartlett's theory. Moreover, the average based ELM ensemble may be viewed as a particular case of our model. Extensive experiments on many standard regression benchmark datasets have been carried out, and comparison with different models has been performed. The experimental findings confirm that the proposed ensemble can reach competitive results in term of the generalization performance, and the training speed. Furthermore, the influence of different hyper parameters on the performance, in term of the prediction error and the training speed, of the developed model has been investigated to provide a meaningful guideline to practical applications.