A Topographic Support Vector Machine: Classification Using Local Label Configurations

The standard approach to the classification of objects is to consider the examples as independent and identically distributed (iid). In many real world settings, however, this assumption is not valid, because a topographical relationshipexists between the objects. In this contribution we consider the special case of image segmentation, where the objects are pixels and where the underlying topography is a 2D regular rectangular grid. We introduce a classification method which not only uses measured vectorial feature information but also the label configuration within a topographic neighborhood.Due to the resulting dependence between the labels of neighboring pixels, a collective classification of a set of pixels becomes necessary. We propose a new method called'Topographic Support VectorMachine' (TSVM), which is based on a topographic kernel and a self-consistent solution to the label assignment shown to be equivalent toa recurrent neural network. The performance of the algorithm is compared to a conventional SVM on a cell image segmentation task.