A recent set of overused population-based methods have been published in recent years. Despite their popularity, most of them have uncertain, immature performance, partially done verifications, similar overused metaphors, similar immature exploration and exploitation components and operations, and an insecure tradeoff between exploration and exploitation trends in most of the new real-world cases. Therefore, all users need to extensively modify and adjust their operations based on main evolutionary methods to reach faster convergence, more stable balance, and high-quality results. To move the optimization community one step ahead toward more focus on performance rather than change of metaphor, a general-purpose population-based optimization technique called Hunger Games Search (HGS) is proposed in this research with a simple structure, special stability features and very competitive performance to realize the solutions of both constrained and unconstrained problems more effectively. The proposed HGS is designed according to the hunger-driven activities and behavioural choice of animals. This dynamic, fitness-wise search method follows a simple concept of “Hunger” as the most crucial homeostatic motivation and reason for behaviours, decisions, and actions in the life of all animals to make the process of optimization more understandable and consistent for new users and decision-makers. The Hunger Games Search incorporates the concept of hunger into the feature process; in other words, an adaptive weight based on the concept of hunger is designed and employed to simulate the effect of hunger on each search step. It follows the computationally logical rules (games) utilized by almost all animals and these rival activities and games are often adaptive evolutionary by securing higher chances of survival and food acquisition. This method's main feature is its dynamic nature, simple structure, and high performance in terms of convergence and acceptable quality of solutions, proving to be more efficient than the current optimization methods. The effectiveness of HGS was verified by comparing HGS with a comprehensive set of popular and advanced algorithms on 23 well-known optimization functions and the IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test suite. Also, the HGS was applied to several engineering problems to demonstrate its applicability. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimizer compared to popular essential optimizers, several advanced variants of the existing methods, and several CEC winners and powerful differential evolution (DE)-based methods abbreviated as LSHADE, SPS_L_SHADE_EIG, LSHADE_cnEpSi, SHADE, SADE, MPEDE, and JDE methods in handling many single-objective problems. We designed this open-source population-based method to be a standard tool for optimization in different areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning with several new exploratory and exploitative features, high performance, and high optimization capacity. The method is very flexible and scalable to be extended to fit more form of optimization cases in both structural aspects and application sides. This paper's source codes, supplementary files, Latex and office source files, sources of plots, a brief version and pseudocode, and an open-source software toolkit for solving optimization problems with Hunger Games Search and online web service for any question, feedback, suggestion, and idea on HGS algorithm will be available to the public at https://aliasgharheidari.com/HGS.html .

Hunger games search: Visions, conception, implementation, deep analysis, perspectives, and towards performance shifts

The optimization field suffers from the metaphor-based “pseudo-novel” or “fancy” optimizers. Most of these cliche methods mimic animals' searching trends and possess a small contribution to the optimization process itself. Most of these cliche methods suffer from the locally efficient performance, biased verification methods on easy problems, and high similarity between their components' interactions. This study attempts to go beyond the traps of metaphors and introduce a novel metaphor-free population-based optimization method based on the mathematical foundations and ideas of the Runge Kutta (RK) method widely well-known in mathematics. The proposed RUNge Kutta optimizer (RUN) was developed to deal with various types of optimization problems in the future. The RUN utilizes the logic of slope variations computed by the RK method as a promising and logical searching mechanism for global optimization. This search mechanism benefits from two active exploration and exploitation phases for exploring the promising regions in the feature space and constructive movement toward the global best solution. Furthermore, an enhanced solution quality (ESQ) mechanism is employed to avoid the local optimal solutions and increase convergence speed. The RUN algorithm's efficiency was evaluated by comparing with other metaheuristic algorithms in 50 mathematical test functions and four real-world engineering problems. The RUN provided very promising and competitive results, showing superior exploration and exploitation tendencies, fast convergence rate, and local optima avoidance. In optimizing the constrained engineering problems, the metaphor-free RUN demonstrated its suitable performance as well. The authors invite the community for extensive evaluations of this deep-rooted optimizer as a promising tool for real-world optimization. The source codes, supplementary materials, and guidance for the developed method will be publicly available at different hubs at http://imanahmadianfar.com and http://aliasgharheidari.com/RUN.html .

RUN beyond the metaphor: An efficient optimization algorithm based on Runge Kutta method

Multi-population differential evolution-assisted Harris hawks optimization: Framework and case studies

This study presents the analysis and principle of an innovative optimizer named weIghted meaN oF vectOrs (INFO) to optimize different problems. INFO is a modified weight mean method, whereby the weighted mean idea is employed for a solid structure and updating the vectors’ position using three core procedures: updating rule, vector combining, and a local search. The updating rule stage is based on a mean-based law and convergence acceleration to generate new vectors. The vector combining stage creates a combination of obtained vectors with the updating rule to achieve a promising solution. The updating rule and vector combining steps were improved in INFO to increase the exploration and exploitation capacities. Moreover, the local search stage helps this algorithm escape low-accuracy solutions and improve exploitation and convergence. The performance of INFO was evaluated in 48 mathematical test functions, and five constrained engineering test cases including optimal design of 10-reservoir system and 4-reservoir system. According to the literature, the results demonstrate that INFO outperforms other basic and advanced methods in terms of exploration and exploitation. In the case of engineering problems, the results indicate that the INFO can converge to 0.99% of the global optimum solution. Hence, the INFO algorithm is a promising tool for optimal designs in optimization problems, which stems from the considerable efficiency of this algorithm for optimizing constrained cases. The source codes of INFO algorithm are publicly available at https://imanahmadianfar.com. and https://aliasgharheidari.com/INFO.html. 

INFO: An efficient optimization algorithm based on weighted mean of vectors

Although the continuous version of ant colony optimizer (ACOR) has been successfully applied to various problems, there is room to boost its stability and improve convergence speed and precision. In addition, it is prone to stagnation, which means it cannot step out of the local optimum (LO). To effectively mitigate these concerns, an improved method using a random spare strategy and chaotic intensification strategy is proposed. Also, its selection mechanism is enhanced in our research. Among the new components, the convergence speed is mainly boosted by using a random spare approach. To effectively augment the ability to step out of LO and to refine the convergence accuracy, the chaotic intensification strategy and improved selection mechanism are applied to ACOR. To better verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a series of comparative experiments are conducted by using 30 benchmark functions. According to all experimental results, it is evident that the convergence rapidity and accuracy of the proposed method is better than other peers. In addition, it is observed that the capability of enhanced RCACO is more reliable than other techniques in stepping out of LO. Furthermore, an excellent multi-threshold image segmentation method is proposed in this paper. On this basis, image segmentation experiments at low threshold levels and high threshold levels are also respectively carried out. The experimental results also adequately disclose that the segmentation results of RCACO for both multi-threshold image segmentation at a low threshold level and high threshold level, are even more satisfactory compared to other studied algorithms. An online homepage supports this research for access to sharable codes, any question and info about this research at https://aliasgharheidari.com .

Chaotic random spare ant colony optimization for multi-threshold image segmentation of 2D Kapur entropy

Hybridizing sine cosine algorithm with differential evolution for global optimization and object tracking

Due to its simplicity and efficiency, a recently proposed optimization algorithm, Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), has gained the interest of researchers from various fields for solving optimization problems. However, it is prone to premature convergence at local minima as it lacks internal memory. To overcome this drawback, a novel Hybrid SCA-PSO algorithm for solving optimization problems and object tracking is proposed. The P b e s t and G b e s t components of PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) is added to traditional SCA to guide the search process for potential candidate solutions and PSO is then initialized with P b e s t of SCA to exploit the search space further. The proposed algorithm combines the exploitation capability of PSO and exploration capability of SCA to achieve optimal global solutions. The effectiveness of this algorithm is evaluated using 23 classical, CEC 2005 and CEC 2014 benchmark functions. Statistical parameters are employed to observe the efficiency of the Hybrid SCA-PSO qualitatively and results prove that the proposed algorithm is very competitive compared to the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. The Hybrid SCA-PSO algorithm is applied for object tracking as a real thought-provoking case study. Experimental results show that the Hybrid SCA-PSO-based tracker can robustly track an arbitrary target in various challenging conditions. To reveal the capability of the proposed algorithm, comparative studies of tracking accuracy and speed of the Hybrid SCA-PSO based tracking framework and other trackers, viz., Particle filter, Mean-shift, Particle swarm optimization, Bat algorithm, Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) and Hybrid Gravitational Search Algorithm (HGSA) is presented.

A synergy of the sine-cosine algorithm and particle swarm optimizer for improved global optimization and object tracking

A novel optimization algorithm called hybrid sine–cosine algorithm with teaching–learning-based optimization algorithm (SCA–TLBO) is proposed in this paper, for solving optimization problems and visual tracking. The proposed hybrid algorithm has better capability to escape from local optima with faster convergence than the standard SCA and TLBO. The effectiveness of this algorithm is evaluated using 23 benchmark functions. Statistical parameters are employed to observe the efficiency of the hybrid SCA–TLBO qualitatively, and results prove that the proposed algorithm is very competitive compared to the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. The hybrid SCA–TLBO algorithm is applied for visual tracking as a real thought-provoking case study. The hybrid SCA–TLBO-based tracking framework is used to experimentally measure object tracking error, absolute error, tracking detection rate, root mean square error and time cost as parameters. To reveal the capability of the proposed algorithm, a comparison of hybrid SCA–TLBO-based tracking framework and other trackers, viz. alpha–beta filter, linear Kalman filter and extended Kalman filter, particle filter, scale-invariant feature transform, particle swarm optimization and bat algorithm, is presented.

Hybrid SCA–TLBO: a novel optimization algorithm for global optimization and visual tracking

Intelligent visual object tracking with particle filter based on modified grey wolf optimizer

Object tracking is one of the challenging issues in computer vision and video processing, which has several potential applications. In this paper, initially, a moving object is selected by frame differencing method and extracted the object by segment thresholding. The bubble sort algorithm (BSA) arranges the regions (large to small) to make sure that there is at least one big region (object) in object detection process. To track the object, a motion model is constructed to set the system models of Alpha-Beta (α-β) filter, Linear Kalman filter (LKF) and Extended Kalman filter (EKF). Many experiments have been conducted on balls with different sizes in image sequences and compared their tracking performance in normal light and bad light conditions. The parameters obtained are the root mean square error (RMSE), absolute error (AE), object tracking error (OTE), Tracking detection rate (TDR), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and they are compared to find the algorithm that performs the best for two conditions.

/pdf/a-new-method-for-ball-tracking-based-on-a-b-linear-kalman-3oye1rjwey.pdf

Hathiram Nenavath

Papers

Hybridizing sine cosine algorithm with differential evolution for global optimization and object tracking

A synergy of the sine-cosine algorithm and particle swarm optimizer for improved global optimization and object tracking

Hybrid SCA–TLBO: a novel optimization algorithm for global optimization and visual tracking

Intelligent visual object tracking with particle filter based on modified grey wolf optimizer

A New Method for Ball Tracking Based on α-β, Linear Kalman and Extended Kalman Filters Via Bubble Sort Algorithm