Feature selection in image analysis: a survey

Image analysis is a prolific field of research which has been broadly studied in the last decades, successfully applied to a great number of disciplines. Since the apparition of Big Data, the number of digital images is explosively growing, and a large amount of multimedia data is publicly available. Not only is it necessary to deal with this increasing number of images, but also to know which features extract from them, and feature selection can help in this scenario. The goal of this paper is to survey the most recent feature selection methods developed and/or applied to image analysis, covering the most popular fields such as image classification, image segmentation, etc. Finally, an experimental evaluation on several popular datasets using well-known feature selection methods is presented, bearing in mind that the aim is not to provide the best feature selection method, but to facilitate comparative studies for the research community.