In domain generalization, the knowledge learnt from one or multiple source domains is transferred to an unseen target domain. In this work, we propose a novel domain generalization approach for fine-grained scene recognition. We first propose a semantic scene descriptor that jointly captures the subtle differences between fine-grained scenes, while being robust to varying object configurations across domains. We model the occurrence patterns of objects in scenes, capturing the informativeness and discriminability of each object for each scene. We then transform such occurrences into scene probabilities for each scene image. Second, we argue that scene images belong to hidden semantic topics that can be discovered by clustering our semantic descriptors. To evaluate the proposed method, we propose a new fine-grained scene dataset in cross-domain settings. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset and three benchmark scene datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for fine-grained scene transfer, where we outperform state-of-the-art scene recognition and domain generalization methods.
Recent approaches have been proposed to target domain generalization for vision tasks. They can be roughly grouped into classifier based @cite_10 @cite_30 approaches and feature-based @cite_26 @cite_1 approaches. In @cite_10 , a support vector machine approach is proposed that learns a set of dataset-specific models and a visual-world model that is common to all datasets. An exemplar-SVM approach is proposed in @cite_30 that exploits the structure of positive samples in the source domain. In feature-based approaches, the goal is to learn invariant features that generalize across domains. In @cite_26 , a kernel-based method is proposed that learns a shared subspace. A feature-learning approach is proposed in @cite_1 that extends denoising autoeconders with naturally-occurring variability in object appearance. While the previous approaches yield good results in object recognition, their performance was not investigated for scene transfer. Also, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work that exploits a semantic approach to domain generalization.
@cite_30 @cite_1 @cite_26 @cite_10
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In this paper, we propose a new approach for domain generalization by exploiting the low-rank structure from multiple latent source domains. Motivated by the recent work on exemplar-SVMs, we aim to train a set of exemplar classifiers with each classifier learnt by using only one positive training sample and all negative training samples. While positive samples may come from multiple latent domains, for the positive samples within the same latent domain, their likelihoods from each exemplar classifier are expected to be similar to each other. Based on this assumption, we formulate a new optimization problem by introducing the nuclear-norm based regularizer on the likelihood matrix to the objective function of exemplar-SVMs. We further extend Domain Adaptation Machine (DAM) to learn an optimal target classifier for domain adaptation. The comprehensive experiments for object recognition and action recognition demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for domain generalization and domain adaptation. The problem of domain generalization is to take knowledge acquired from a number of related domains where training data is available, and to then successfully apply it to previously unseen domains. We propose a new feature learning algorithm, Multi-Task Autoencoder (MTAE), that provides good generalization performance for cross-domain object recognition. Our algorithm extends the standard denoising autoencoder framework by substituting artificially induced corruption with naturally occurring inter-domain variability in the appearance of objects. Instead of reconstructing images from noisy versions, MTAE learns to transform the original image into analogs in multiple related domains. It thereby learns features that are robust to variations across domains. The learnt features are then used as inputs to a classifier. We evaluated the performance of the algorithm on benchmark image recognition datasets, where the task is to learn features from multiple datasets and to then predict the image label from unseen datasets. We found that (denoising) MTAE outperforms alternative autoencoder-based models as well as the current state-of-the-art algorithms for domain generalization. This paper investigates domain generalization: How to take knowledge acquired from an arbitrary number of related domains and apply it to previously unseen domains? We propose Domain-Invariant Component Analysis (DICA), a kernel-based optimization algorithm that learns an invariant transformation by minimizing the dissimilarity across domains, whilst preserving the functional relationship between input and output variables. A learning-theoretic analysis shows that reducing dissimilarity improves the expected generalization ability of classifiers on new domains, motivating the proposed algorithm. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DICA successfully learns invariant features and improves classifier performance in practice. The presence of bias in existing object recognition datasets is now well-known in the computer vision community. While it remains in question whether creating an unbiased dataset is possible given limited resources, in this work we propose a discriminative framework that directly exploits dataset bias during training. In particular, our model learns two sets of weights: (1) bias vectors associated with each individual dataset, and (2) visual world weights that are common to all datasets, which are learned by undoing the associated bias from each dataset. The visual world weights are expected to be our best possible approximation to the object model trained on an unbiased dataset, and thus tend to have good generalization ability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by applying the learned weights to a novel, unseen dataset, and report superior results for both classification and detection tasks compared to a classical SVM that does not account for the presence of bias. Overall, we find that it is beneficial to explicitly account for bias when combining multiple datasets.