Scene classification using a new radial basis function classifier and integrated SIFT–LBP features

Scene classification is one of the most significant and challenging tasks in computer vision. This paper presents a new method for scene classification using bag of visual words and a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based artificial neural network classifier. Contributions of this paper are introducing a novel feature integration method using scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and local binary pattern (LBP) and a new framework for training radial basis function neural network, combining optimum steepest decent method with a specially designed PSO-based optimizer for center adjustment of radial basis function neural network. Our study shows that using LBP increases the performance of classification task compared to using SIFT only. In addition, our experiments on Proben1 dataset demonstrate improvements in classification performance (averagely about 6.04%) and convergence speed of the proposed radial basis function neural network. The proposed radial basis function neural network is then employed in scene classification task. Results are reported for classification of the Oliva and Torralba, Fei–Fei and Perona and Lazebnik et al. datasets. We compare the performance of the proposed classifier with a multi-way SVM classifier. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed classifier over the state-of-the-art on the three datasets.