Exemplar Based Deep Discriminative and Shareable Feature Learning for Scene Image Classification

In order to encode the class correlation and class specific information in image representation, we propose a new local feature learning approach named Deep Discriminative and Shareable Feature Learning (DDSFL). DDSFL aims to hierarchically learn feature transformation filter banks to transform raw pixel image patches to features. The learned filter banks are expected to: (1) encode common visual patterns of a flexible number of categories; (2) encode discriminative information; and (3) hierarchically extract patterns at different visual levels. Particularly, in each single layer of DDSFL, shareable filters are jointly learned for classes which share the similar patterns. Discriminative power of the filters is achieved by enforcing the features from the same category to be close, while features from different categories to be far away from each other. Furthermore, we also propose two exemplar selection methods to iteratively select training data for more efficient and effective learning. Based on the experimental results, DDSFL can achieve very promising performance, and it also shows great complementary effect to the state-of-the-art Caffe features.Comment: Pattern Recognition, Elsevier, 201

Investigation of new learning methods for visual recognition

Visual recognition is one of the most difficult and prevailing problems in computer vision and pattern recognition due to the challenges in understanding the semantics and contents of digital images. Two major components of a visual recognition system are discriminatory feature representation and efficient and accurate pattern classification. This dissertation therefore focuses on developing new learning methods for visual recognition. Based on the conventional sparse representation, which shows its robustness for visual recognition problems, a series of new methods is proposed. Specifically, first, a new locally linear K nearest neighbor method, or LLK method, is presented. The LLK method derives a new representation, which is an approximation to the ideal representation, by optimizing an objective function based on a host of criteria for sparsity, locality, and reconstruction. The novel representation is further processed by two new classifiers, namely, an LLK based classifier (LLKc) and a locally linear nearest mean based classifier (LLNc), for visual recognition. The proposed classifiers are shown to connect to the Bayes decision rule for minimum error. Second, a new generative and discriminative sparse representation (GDSR) method is proposed by taking advantage of both a coarse modeling of the generative information and a modeling of the discriminative information. The proposed GDSR method integrates two new criteria, namely, a discriminative criterion and a generative criterion, into the conventional sparse representation criterion. A new generative and discriminative sparse representation based classification (GDSRc) method is then presented based on the derived new representation. Finally, a new Score space based multiple Metric Learning (SML) method is presented for a challenging visual recognition application, namely, recognizing kinship relations or kinship verification. The proposed SML method, which goes beyond the conventional Mahalanobis distance metric learning, not only learns the distance metric but also models the generative process of features by taking advantage of the score space. The SML method is optimized by solving a constrained, non-negative, and weighted variant of the sparse representation problem. To assess the feasibility of the proposed new learning methods, several visual recognition tasks, such as face recognition, scene recognition, object recognition, computational fine art analysis, action recognition, fine grained recognition, as well as kinship verification are applied. The experimental results show that the proposed new learning methods achieve better performance than the other popular methods

Towards Effective Codebookless Model for Image Classification

The bag-of-features (BoF) model for image classification has been thoroughly studied over the last decade. Different from the widely used BoF methods which modeled images with a pre-trained codebook, the alternative codebook free image modeling method, which we call Codebookless Model (CLM), attracted little attention. In this paper, we present an effective CLM that represents an image with a single Gaussian for classification. By embedding Gaussian manifold into a vector space, we show that the simple incorporation of our CLM into a linear classifier achieves very competitive accuracy compared with state-of-the-art BoF methods (e.g., Fisher Vector). Since our CLM lies in a high dimensional Riemannian manifold, we further propose a joint learning method of low-rank transformation with support vector machine (SVM) classifier on the Gaussian manifold, in order to reduce computational and storage cost. To study and alleviate the side effect of background clutter on our CLM, we also present a simple yet effective partial background removal method based on saliency detection. Experiments are extensively conducted on eight widely used databases to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our CLM method

Data Driven Approaches for Image & Video Understanding: from Traditional to Zero-shot Supervised Learning

In the present age of advanced computer vision, the necessity of (user-annotated) data is a key factor in image & video understanding. Recent success of deep learning on large scale data has only acted as a catalyst. There are certain problems that exist in this regard: 1) scarcity of (annotated) data, 2) need of expensive manual annotation, 3) problem of change in domain, 4) knowledge base not exhaustive. To make efficient learning systems, one has to be prepared to deal with such diverse set of problems. In terms of data availability, extensive manual annotation can be beneficial in obtaining category specific knowledge. Even then, learning efficient representation for the related task is challenging and requires special attention. On the other hand, when labelled data is scarce, learning category specific representation itself becomes challenging. In this work, I investigate data driven approaches that cater to traditional supervised learning setup as well as an extreme case of data scarcity where no data from test classes are available during training, known as zero-shot learning. First, I look into supervised learning setup with ample annotations and propose efficient dictionary learning technique for better learning of data representation for the task of action classification in images & videos. Then I propose robust mid-level feature representations for action videos that are equally effective in traditional supervised learning as well as zero-shot learning. Finally, I come up with novel approach that cater to zero-shot learning specifically. Thorough discussions followed by experimental validations establish the worth of these novel techniques in solving computer vision related tasks under varying data-dependent scenarios