International audienceThis paper proposes a novel approach to learning mid-level image models for image categorization and cosegmentation. We represent each image class by a dictionary of discriminative part detectors that best discriminate that class from the background. We learn category-specific part detectors in a weakly supervised setting in which the training images are only labeled with category labels without part / object location labels. We use a latent SVM model regularized by l1,2 group sparsity to learn the discriminative part detectors. Starting from a large set of initial parts, the group sparsity regularizer forces the model to jointly select and optimize a set of discriminative part detectors in a max-margin framework. We propose a stochastic version of a proximal algorithm to solve the corresponding optimization problem. We apply the learned part detectors to image classification and cosegmentation, and quantitative experiments with standard benchmarks show that our approach matches or improves upon the state of the art
