Region-Enhanced Multi-layer Extreme Learning Machine

Deep neural networks have made significant achievements in representation learning of traditionally man-made features, especially in terms of complex objects. Over the decades, this learning process has attracted thousands of researchers and has been widely used in the speech, visual, and text recognition fields. One deep network multi-layer extreme learning machine (ML-ELM) achieves a good performance in representation learning while inheriting the advantages of faster learning and the approximating capability of the extreme learning machine (ELM). However, as with most deep networks, the ML-ELM’s algorithmic performance largely depends on the probability distribution of the training data. In this paper, we propose an improved ML-ELM made via using the local significant regions at the input end to enhance the contributions of these regions according to the idea of the selective attention mechanism. To avoid involving and exploring the complex principle of the attention system and to focus on the clarification of our local regional enhancement idea, the paper only selects two typical attention regions. One is the geometric central region, which is normally the important region to attract human attention due to the focal attention mechanism. The other is the task-driven interest region, with facial recognition as an example. The comprehensive experiments are done on the three public datasets of MNIST, NORB, and ORL. The comparison experiment results demonstrate that our proposed region-enhanced ML-ELM (RE-ML-ELM) achieves performance increases in important feature learning by utilizing the apriori knowledge of attention and has a higher recognition rate than that of the normal ML-ELM and the basic ELM. Moreover, it benefits from the non-iterative parameter training method of other ELMs, and our proposed algorithm outperforms most state-of-the-art deep networks such as deep belief network(DBN), in the aspects of training efficiency. Furthermore, because of the deep structure with fewer hidden nodes at each layer, our proposed RE-ML-ELM achieves a comparable training efficiency to that of the ML-ELM but has a higher training speed with the basic ELM, which is normally the width single network that has more hidden nodes to obtain the similar recognition accuracy with the deep networks. Based on our idea of combining the apriori knowledge of the human selective attention system with the data learning, our proposed region-enhanced ML-ELM increases the image classification performance. We believe that the idea of intentionally combining psychological knowledge with the most algorithms based on data-driven learning has the potential to improve their cognitive computing ability.