A statistical method for binary classification of images

The classification of documents with sparse text, and video analysis, relies on accurate image classification. We herein present a method for binary classification that accommodates any number of individual classifiers. Each individual classifier is defined by the critical point between its two means, and its relative weighting is inversely proportional to its expected error rate. Using 10 simple image analysis metrics, we distinguish a set of "natural" and "city" scenes, providing a "semantically meaningful" classification. The optimal combination of 5 of these 10 classifiers provides 85.8% accuracy on a small (120 image) feasibility corpus. When this feasibility corpus is then split into half training and half testing images, the mean accuracy of the optimum set of classifiers was 81.7%. Accuracy as high as 90% was obtained for the test set when training percentage was increased. These results demonstrate that an accurate classifier can be constructed from a large pool of simple classifiers through the use of the statistical ("Normal") classification method described herein.