Recent Advances in Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Visual Recognition: A Problem-Oriented Perspective

This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a possible solution accordingly

Complex Event Recognition from Images with Few Training Examples

We propose to leverage concept-level representations for complex event recognition in photographs given limited training examples. We introduce a novel framework to discover event concept attributes from the web and use that to extract semantic features from images and classify them into social event categories with few training examples. Discovered concepts include a variety of objects, scenes, actions and event sub-types, leading to a discriminative and compact representation for event images. Web images are obtained for each discovered event concept and we use (pretrained) CNN features to train concept classifiers. Extensive experiments on challenging event datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several baselines using deep CNN features directly in classifying images into events with limited training examples. We also demonstrate that our method achieves the best overall accuracy on a dataset with unseen event categories using a single training example.Comment: Accepted to Winter Applications of Computer Vision (WACV'17

Joint Intermodal and Intramodal Label Transfers for Extremely Rare or Unseen Classes

In this paper, we present a label transfer model from texts to images for image classification tasks. The problem of image classification is often much more challenging than text classification. On one hand, labeled text data is more widely available than the labeled images for classification tasks. On the other hand, text data tends to have natural semantic interpretability, and they are often more directly related to class labels. On the contrary, the image features are not directly related to concepts inherent in class labels. One of our goals in this paper is to develop a model for revealing the functional relationships between text and image features as to directly transfer intermodal and intramodal labels to annotate the images. This is implemented by learning a transfer function as a bridge to propagate the labels between two multimodal spaces. However, the intermodal label transfers could be undermined by blindly transferring the labels of noisy texts to annotate images. To mitigate this problem, we present an intramodal label transfer process, which complements the intermodal label transfer by transferring the image labels instead when relevant text is absent from the source corpus. In addition, we generalize the inter-modal label transfer to zero-shot learning scenario where there are only text examples available to label unseen classes of images without any positive image examples. We evaluate our algorithm on an image classification task and show the effectiveness with respect to the other compared algorithms.Comment: The paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. It will apear in a future issu