A Fast MLP-based Learning Method and its Application to Mine Countermeasure Missions

Abstract

In this research, a novel machine learning method is designed and applied to Mine Countermeasure Missions. Similarly to some kernel methods, the proposed approach seeks to compute a linear model from another higher dimensional feature space. However, no kernel is used and the feature mapping is explicit. Computation can be done directly in the accessible feature space. In the proposed approach, the feature projection is implemented by constructing a large hidden layer, which differs from traditional belief that Multi-Layer Perceptron is usually funnel-shaped and the hidden layer is used as feature extractor. The proposed approach is a general method that can be applied to various problems. It is able to improve the performance of the neural network based methods and the learning speed of support vector machine. The classification speed of the proposed approach is also faster than that of kernel machines on the mine countermeasure mission task.