In this paper, we present a subclass-representation approach that predicts the probability of a social image belonging to one particular class. We explore the co-occurrence of user-contributed tags to find subclasses with a strong connection to the top level class. We then project each image on to the resulting subclass space to generate a subclass representation for the image. The novelty of the approach is that subclass representations make use of not only the content of the photos themselves, but also information on the co-occurrence of their tags, which determines membership in both subclasses and top-level classes. The novelty is also that the images are classified into smaller classes, which have a chance of being more visually stable and easier to model. These subclasses are used as a latent space and images are represented in this space by their probability of relatedness to all of the subclasses. In contrast to approaches directly modeling each top-level class based on the image content, the proposed method can exploit more information for visually diverse classes. The approach is evaluated on a set of @math million photos with 10 classes, released by the Multimedia 2013 Yahoo! Large-scale Flickr-tag Image Classification Grand Challenge. Experiments show that the proposed system delivers sound performance for visually diverse classes compared with methods that directly model top classes.
Generating sub-categories has been considered as an effective method to deal with classification problems where intra-class variation is high. The ImageNet @cite_1 organizes image dataset with labels corresponding to a semantic hierarchy. This method is able to build comprehensive ontology for large scale dataset. However, for a particular dataset, the sub-categories generated by data driven strategies are expected to be more discriminative. @cite_8 exploits co-watch information to learn latent sub-tags for video tag prediction. @cite_4 proposes to discover the image hierarchy by using both visual and tag information. Our method generates category-specific subclasses by exploring image tag co-occurrence, and trains classifiers for each subclass-tag. These subclasses based models are expected to be discriminative in terms of estimating the target tags, corresponding to top-level classes.
@cite_1 @cite_4 @cite_8
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Abstract Studies show that refining real-world categories into semantic subcategories contributes to better image modeling and classification. Previous image sub-categorization work relying on labeled images and WordNet’s hierarchy is labor-intensive. To tackle this problem, in this work, we extract textual and visual features to automatically select and subsequently classify web images into semantic rich categories. The following two major challenges are well studied: (1) noise in the labels of subcategories derived from the general corpus; (2) noise in the labels of images retrieved from the web. Specifically, we first obtain the semantic refinement subcategories from the text perspective and remove the noise by using the relevance-based approach. To suppress the search error induced noisy images, we then formulate image selection and classifier learning as a multi-instance learning problem and propose to solve the employed problem by the cutting-plane algorithm. The experiments show significant performance gains by using the generated data of our approach on image categorization tasks. The proposed approach also consistently outperforms existing weakly supervised and web-supervised approaches. Visual categorization problems, such as object classification or action recognition, are increasingly often approached using a detection strategy: a classifier function is first applied to candidate subwindows of the image or the video, and then the maximum classifier score is used for class decision. Traditionally, the subwindow classifiers are trained on a large collection of examples manually annotated with masks or bounding boxes. The reliance on time-consuming human labeling effectively limits the application of these methods to problems involving very few categories. Furthermore, the human selection of the masks introduces arbitrary biases (e.g. in terms of window size and location) which may be suboptimal for classification. In this paper we propose a novel method for learning a discriminative subwindow classifier from examples annotated with binary labels indicating the presence of an object or action of interest, but not its location. During training, our approach simultaneously localizes the instances of the positive class and learns a subwindow SVM to recognize them. We extend our method to classification of time series by presenting an algorithm that localizes the most discriminative set of temporal segments in the signal. We evaluate our approach on several datasets for object and action recognition and show that it achieves results similar and in many cases superior to those obtained with full supervision. For the task of visual categorization, the learning model is expected to be endowed with discriminative visual feature representation and flexibilities in processing many categories. Many existing approaches are designed based on a flat category structure, or rely on a set of pre-computed visual features, hence may not be appreciated for dealing with large numbers of categories. In this paper, we propose a novel dictionary learning method by taking advantage of hierarchical category correlation. For each internode of the hierarchical category structure, a discriminative dictionary and a set of classification models are learnt for visual categorization, and the dictionaries in different layers are learnt to exploit the discriminative visual properties of different granularity. Moreover, the dictionaries in lower levels also inherit the dictionary of ancestor nodes, so that categories in lower levels are described with multi-scale visual information using our dictionary learning approach. Experiments on Image Net object data subset and SUN397 scene dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves promising performance on data with large numbers of classes compared with some state-of-the-art methods, and is more efficient in processing large numbers of categories. The recently proposed ImageNet dataset consists of several million images, each annotated with a single object category. However, these annotations may be imperfect, in the sense that many images contain multiple objects belonging to the label vocabulary. In other words, we have a multi-label problem but the annotations include only a single label (and not necessarily the most prominent). Such a setting motivates the use of a robust evaluation measure, which allows for a limited number of labels to be predicted and, as long as one of the predicted labels is correct, the overall prediction should be considered correct. This is indeed the type of evaluation measure used to assess algorithm performance in a recent competition on ImageNet data. Optimizing such types of performance measures presents several hurdles even with existing structured output learning methods. Indeed, many of the current state-of-the-art methods optimize the prediction of only a single output label, ignoring this 'structure' altogether. In this paper, we show how to directly optimize continuous surrogates of such performance measures using structured output learning techniques with latent variables. We use the output of existing binary classifiers as input features in a new learning stage which optimizes the structured loss corresponding to the robust performance measure. We present empirical evidence that this allows us to 'boost' the performance of existing binary classifiers which are the state-of-the-art for the task of object classification in ImageNet.