Extreme learning machine (ELM) is an emerging learning algorithm for the generalized single hidden layer feedforward neural networks, of which the hidden node parameters are randomly generated and the output weights are analytically computed. However, due to its shallow architecture, feature learning using ELM may not be effective for natural signals (e.g., images/videos), even with a large number of hidden nodes. To address this issue, in this paper, a new ELM-based hierarchical learning framework is proposed for multilayer perceptron. The proposed architecture is divided into two main components: 1) self-taught feature extraction followed by supervised feature classification and 2) they are bridged by random initialized hidden weights. The novelties of this paper are as follows: 1) unsupervised multilayer encoding is conducted for feature extraction, and an ELM-based sparse autoencoder is developed via l1 constraint. By doing so, it achieves more compact and meaningful feature representations than the original ELM; 2) by exploiting the advantages of ELM random feature mapping, the hierarchically encoded outputs are randomly projected before final decision making, which leads to a better generalization with faster learning speed; and 3) unlike the greedy layerwise training of deep learning (DL), the hidden layers of the proposed framework are trained in a forward manner. Once the previous layer is established, the weights of the current layer are fixed without fine-tuning. Therefore, it has much better learning efficiency than the DL. Extensive experiments on various widely used classification data sets show that the proposed algorithm achieves better and faster convergence than the existing state-of-the-art hierarchical learning methods. Furthermore, multiple applications in computer vision further confirm the generality and capability of the proposed learning scheme.

Ship detection on spaceborne images has attracted great interest in the applications of maritime security and traffic control. Optical images stand out from other remote sensing images in object detection due to their higher resolution and more visualized contents. However, most of the popular techniques for ship detection from optical spaceborne images have two shortcomings: 1) Compared with infrared and synthetic aperture radar images, their results are affected by weather conditions, like clouds and ocean waves, and 2) the higher resolution results in larger data volume, which makes processing more difficult. Most of the previous works mainly focus on solving the first problem by improving segmentation or classification with complicated algorithms. These methods face difficulty in efficiently balancing performance and complexity. In this paper, we propose a ship detection approach to solving the aforementioned two issues using wavelet coefficients extracted from JPEG2000 compressed domain combined with deep neural network (DNN) and extreme learning machine (ELM). Compressed domain is adopted for fast ship candidate extraction, DNN is exploited for high-level feature representation and classification, and ELM is used for efficient feature pooling and decision making. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison with the existing relevant state-of-the-art approaches, the proposed method requires less detection time and achieves higher detection accuracy.

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is an efficient training algorithm originally proposed for single-hidden layer feedforward networks (SLFNs), of which the input weights are randomly chosen and need not to be fine-tuned. In this paper, we present a new stack architecture for ELM, to further improve the learning accuracy of ELM while maintaining its advantage of training speed. By exploiting the hidden information of ELM random feature space, a recovery-based training model is developed and incorporated into the proposed ELM stack architecture. Experimental results of the MNIST handwriting dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better and much faster convergence than the state-of-the-art ELM and deep learning methods.