abstract = "Soft computing (SC) includes computational techniques
that are tolerant of approximations, missing
information, and uncertainty, and aim at providing
effective and efficient solutions to problems which may
be unsolvable, or too time-consuming to solve, with
exhaustive techniques. SC has found many applications
in various domains of research and industry, including
computer vision (CV). This dissertation focuses on
tasks of full reference image quality assessment
(FR-IQA) and fast scene understanding (FSU). The former
consists of assessing images visual quality in regard
to some pristine reference. The latter consists of
classifying each pixel of a scene assuming a rapidly
changing environment like, for instance, in a
self-driving car. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA)
in both FR-IQA and FSU rely upon convolutional neural
networks (CNNs), which can be seen as a computational
metaphor of the human visual cortex. Although CNNs
achieved unprecedented results in many CV tasks, they
also present several drawbacks: massive amounts of data
and processing resources for training; the difficulty
of outputs interpretation; reduced usability for
compact battery-powered devices... This dissertation
addresses FR-IQA and FSU using SC techniques other than
CNNs. Initially, we created a flexible and efficient
library to support our endeavors; it is publicly
available and implements a wide range of metaheuristics
to solve different problems. Then, we used swarm and
evolutionary computation to optimize the parameters of
several traditional FR-IQA measures (FR-IQAMs) that
integrate the so called structural similarity paradigm;
the novel parameters improve measures' precision
without affecting their complexity. Afterward, we
applied genetic programming (GP) to automatically
formulate novel FR-IQAMs that are simultaneously
simple, accurate, and interpretable. Lastly, we used GP
as a meta-model for stacking efficient CNNs for FSU;
the approach allowed us to obtain simple and
interpretable models that did not exceed processing
preconditions for real-time applications while
achieving high levels of precision.",