We introduce a learning framework called learning using privileged information (LUPI) to the computer vision field. We focus on the prototypical computer vision problem of teaching computers to recognize objects in images. We want the computers to be able to learn faster at the expense of providing extra information during training time. As additional information about the image data, we look at several scenarios that have been studied in computer vision before: attributes, bounding boxes and image tags. The information is privileged as it is available at training time but not at test time. We explore two maximum-margin techniques that are able to make use of this additional source of information, for binary and multiclass object classification. We interpret these methods as learning easiness and hardness of the objects in the privileged space and then transferring this knowledge to train a better classifier in the original space. We provide a thorough analysis and comparison of information transfer from privileged to the original data spaces for both LUPI methods. Our experiments show that incorporating privileged information can improve the classification accuracy. Finally, we conduct user studies to understand which samples are easy and which are hard for human learning, and explore how this information is related to easy and hard samples when learning a classifier.
In computer vision problems it is common to have access to multiple sources of information. Sometimes all of them are visual, such as when images are represented by color features as well as by texture features. Sometimes, the modalities are mixed, such as for images with text captions. If all modalities are present both at training and at test time, it is rather straight-forward to combine them for better prediction performance. This is studied, e.g., in the fields of or learning. Methods suggested here range from , where one simply concatenates the feature vectors of all data modalities, to complex adaptive methods for early or late data fusions @cite_2 , including @cite_22 and @cite_42 .
@cite_42 @cite_22 @cite_2
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A key ingredient in the design of visual object classification systems is the identification of relevant class specific aspects while being robust to intra-class variations. While this is a necessity in order to generalize beyond a given set of training images, it is also a very difficult problem due to the high variability of visual appearance within each class. In the last years substantial performance gains on challenging benchmark datasets have been reported in the literature. This progress can be attributed to two developments: the design of highly discriminative and robust image features and the combination of multiple complementary features based on different aspects such as shape, color or texture. In this paper we study several models that aim at learning the correct weighting of different features from training data. These include multiple kernel learning as well as simple baseline methods. Furthermore we derive ensemble methods inspired by Boosting which are easily extendable to several multiclass setting. All methods are thoroughly evaluated on object classification datasets using a multitude of feature descriptors. The key results are that even very simple baseline methods, that are orders of magnitude faster than learning techniques are highly competitive with multiple kernel learning. Furthermore the Boosting type methods are found to produce consistently better results in all experiments. We provide insight of when combination methods can be expected to work and how the benefit of complementary features can be exploited most efficiently. Our objective is to obtain a state-of-the art object category detector by employing a state-of-the-art image classifier to search for the object in all possible image sub-windows. We use multiple kernel learning of Varma and Ray (ICCV 2007) to learn an optimal combination of exponential χ2 kernels, each of which captures a different feature channel. Our features include the distribution of edges, dense and sparse visual words, and feature descriptors at different levels of spatial organization. Semantic analysis of multimodal video aims to index segments of interest at a conceptual level. In reaching this goal, it requires an analysis of several information streams. At some point in the analysis these streams need to be fused. In this paper, we consider two classes of fusion schemes, namely early fusion and late fusion. The former fuses modalities in feature space, the latter fuses modalities in semantic space. We show by experiment on 184 hours of broadcast video data and for 20 semantic concepts, that late fusion tends to give slightly better performance for most concepts. However, for those concepts where early fusion performs better the difference is more significant.