Within the medical field, computer vision has an important role in different tasks, such as health anomaly detection, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring medical conditions. Image segmentation is one of the most used techniques for medical support to identify regions of interest in different organs. However, performing accurate segmentation is difficult due to image variations. In this way, this work proposes an automated multiple-feature construction approach for image segmentation, working with magnetic resonance images, computed tomography, and RGB digital images. Genetic programming is used to automatically create and construct pipelines to extract meaningful features for segmentation tasks. Additionally, a co-evolution strategy is proposed within the evolution process to increase diversity without affecting segmentation performance. The segmentation is addressed as a pixel classification task; in this way, a wrapper approach is used, and the classification model’s segmentation performance determines the fitness. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, four datasets were used to measure the capability of the proposal to deal with different types of medical images. The results demonstrate that the proposal achieves values of the DICE similarity coefficient of more than 0.6 in MRI and C.T. images. Additionally, the proposal is compared with SOTA GP-based methods and the convolutional neural networks used within the medical field. The method proposed outperforms these methods, achieving improvements greater than $20\%$ in DICE, specificity, and sensitivity. Additionally, the qualitative results demonstrate that the proposal accurately identifies the region of interest.

Image classification is an important application in different areas of computer vision. Genetic Programming (GP) has demonstrated an excellent capability to deal with this task. However, many approaches transform images to grayscale due to the computational cost of working with color spaces. Therefore, possible significant image features for classification could be discarded early. Consequently, our proposal incorporates features extracted from different color spaces for image classification through GP in three datasets. Furthermore, the GP's flexibility allows the images' color space conversion during the evolutionary process. According to the dataset, the final solution determines whether a specific color space was used or if it was necessary to change to another to extract meaningful features from the images. The results demonstrate that changing the color space in some data sets was necessary to achieve competitive classification accuracy.

Computer vision and image processing have become relevant in recent years due to their capabilities to support different tasks in several areas. Image classification, segmentation, and estimation are relevant issues addressed using various techniques. Imaging estimation is very important and helpful in biological applications. This work proposes a new approach for estimating the damages in the livers of the Wistar rats, using high-resolution RGB images. Instead of using invasive methods to determine the level of damage, the proposal allows us to measure the damage in the livers. The proposal is based on Genetic Programming (GP), the paradigm of evolutionary computing, which has become relevant in recent years for image-processing tasks. It provides flexibility, which allows the use of image processing functions to extract meaningful information from raw images. Furthermore, it allows the configuration of the regression model by performing a hyperparameter tuning to improve estimation performance. The approach includes a new set of functions through which the regression model is configured. Additionally, a set of functions is included to change the color spaces of the images to extract meaningful features from them. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when making the hyperparameter tuning and the efficiency in dealing with different color spaces, thus achieving the promised results when estimating according to the $R^2$, Mean Average Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) indicators. The proposed method achieves values higher than 0.5 of $R^2$ and lower than 0.51 of MSE, using different regression models. Additionally, the approach demonstrates that image preprocessing is necessary for improving the model’s performance, which is better than only using raw data where the values of RMSE are greater than 1.5. The lowest MSE value of our proposed method was 0.51, outperforming the methods without preprocessing.

Feature construction and feature selection are essential pre-processing techniques in data mining, especially for high-dimensional data. The principal goals of such techniques are to increase accuracy in classification tasks and reduce runtime in the learning process. Genetic programming is used to construct a new high-level feature space. Additionally, the feature selection process, immersed in the task, is seized. Therefore, a set of features with relevant information is obtained. This paper presents an approach to reducing the features of high-dimensional data throughout genetic programming. Moreover, reducing the search space eliminates features that do not have considerable information over the generations of the search process. Although the approach is simple, competitive results are achieved. In the implementation, the wrapper approach is used for the classifier to lead the searching process.