Recent studies on multi-label image classification have focused on designing more complex architectures of deep neural networks such as the use of attention mechanisms and region proposal networks. Although performance gains have been reported, the backbone deep models of the proposed approaches and the evaluation metrics employed in different works vary, making it difficult to compare each fairly. Moreover, due to the lack of properly investigated baselines, the advantage introduced by the proposed techniques are often ambiguous. To address these issues, we make a thorough investigation of the mainstream deep convolutional neural network architectures for multi-label image classification and present a strong baseline. With the use of proper data augmentation techniques and model ensembles, the basic deep architectures can achieve better performance than many existing more complex ones on three benchmark datasets, providing great insight for the future studies on multi-label image classification.
Early works on multi-label image classification use hand-crafted image features and classifiers adapted to multi-label classification. TagProp @cite_20 is an approach proposed by using a weighted nearest-neighbor model to exploit multi-label training images. Matrix completion approach was proposed by @cite_17 , assuming that the histogram based features of a multi-label image can be decomposed as a linear combination of multiple class histogram basis. The performance of these early works is restricted due to the poor ability of hand-crafted features in representing complex visual information in multi-label images.
@cite_20 @cite_17
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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great performance as general feature representations for object recognition applications. However, for multi-label images that contain multiple objects from different categories, scales and locations, global CNN features are not optimal. In this paper, we incorporate local information to enhance the feature discriminative power. In particular, we first extract object proposals from each image. With each image treated as a bag and object proposals extracted from it treated as instances, we transform the multi-label recognition problem into a multi-class multi-instance learning problem. Then, in addition to extracting the typical CNN feature representation from each proposal, we propose to make use of ground-truth bounding box annotations (strong labels) to add another level of local information by using nearest-neighbor relationships of local regions to form a multi-view pipeline. The proposed multi-view multiinstance framework utilizes both weak and strong labels effectively, and more importantly it has the generalization ability to even boost the performance of unseen categories by partial strong labels from other categories. Our framework is extensively compared with state-of-the-art handcrafted feature based methods and CNN based methods on two multi-label benchmark datasets. The experimental results validate the discriminative power and the generalization ability of the proposed framework. With strong labels, our framework is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in both datasets. Multi-label image classification is a challenging problem in computer vision. Motivated by the recent development in image classification performance using Deep Neural Networks, in this work, we propose a flexible deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework, called Local-Global-CNN (LGC), to improve multi-label image classification performance. LGC consists of firstly a local level multi-label classifier which takes object segment hypotheses as inputs to a local CNN. The output results of these local hypotheses are aggregated together with max-pooling and then re-weighted to consider the label co-occurrence or interdependencies information by using a graphical model in the label space. LGC also utilizes a global CNN that is trained by multi-label images to directly predict the multiple labels from the input. The predictions of local and global level classifiers are finally fused together to obtain MAP estimation of the final multi-label prediction. The above LGC framework could benefit from a pre-train process with a large-scale single-label image dataset, e.g., ImageNet. Experimental results have shown that the proposed framework could achieve promising performance on Pascal VOC2007 and VOC2012 multi-label image dataset. This paper presents a novel multi-label active learning (MLAL) technique in the framework of multi-label remote sensing (RS) image scene classification problems. The proposed MLAL technique is developed in the framework of the multi-label SVM classifier (ML-SVM). Unlike the standard AL methods, the proposed MLAL technique redefines active learning by evaluating the informativeness of each image based on its multiple land-cover classes. Accordingly, the proposed MLAL technique is based on the joint evaluation of two criteria for the selection of the most informative images: i) multi-label uncertainty and ii) multi-label diversity. The multi-label uncertainty criterion is associated to the confidence of the multi-label classification algorithm in correctly assigning multi-labels to each image, whereas multi-label diversity criterion aims at selecting a set of un-annotated images that are as more diverse as possible to reduce the redundancy among them. In order to evaluate the multi-label uncertainty of each image, we propose a novel multi-label margin sampling strategy that: 1) considers the functional distances of each image to all ML-SVM hyperplanes; and then 2) estimates the occurrence on how many times each image falls inside the margins of ML-SVMs. If the occurrence is small, the classifiers are confident to correctly classify the considered image, and vice versa. In order to evaluate the multi-label diversity of each image, we propose a novel clustering-based strategy that clusters all the images inside the margins of the ML-SVMs and avoids selecting the uncertain images from the same clusters. The joint use of the two criteria allows one to enrich the training set of images with multi-labels. Experimental results obtained on a benchmark archive with 2100 images with their multi-labels show the effectiveness of the proposed MLAL method compared to the standard AL methods that neglect the evaluation of the uncertainty and diversity on multi-labels. Multi-label classification refers to learning tasks with each instance belonging to one or more classes simultaneously. It arose from real-world applications such as information retrieval, text categorization and functional genomics. Currently, most of the multi-label learning methods use the strategy called binary relevance, which constructs a classifier for each unique label by grouping data into positives (examples with this label) and negatives (examples without this label). With binary relevance, an example with multiple labels is considered as a positive data for each label it belongs to. For some classes, this data point may behave like an outlier confusing classifiers, especially in the cases of well-separated classes. In this paper, we first introduce a new strategy called soft relevance, where each multi-label example is assigned a relevance score to the labels it belongs to. This soft relevance is then employed in a voting function used in a k nearest neighbor classifier. Furthermore, a voting-margin ratio is introduced to the k nearest neighbor classifier for better performance. We compare the proposed method to other multi-label learning methods over three multi-label datasets and demonstrate that the proposed method provides an effective way to multi-label learning.