As of today, object categorization algorithms are not able to achieve the level of robustness and generality necessary to work reliably in the real world. Even the most powerful convolutional neural network we can train fails to perform satisfactorily when trained and tested on data from different databases. This issue, known as domain adaptation and or dataset bias in the literature, is due to a distribution mismatch between data collections. Methods addressing it go from max-margin classifiers to learning how to modify the features and obtain a more robust representation. Recent work showed that by casting the problem into the image-to-class recognition framework, the domain adaptation problem is significantly alleviated danbnn . Here we follow this approach, and show how a very simple, learning free Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN)-based domain adaptation algorithm can significantly alleviate the distribution mismatch among source and target data, especially when the number of classes and the number of sources grow. Experiments on standard benchmarks used in the literature show that our approach (a) is competitive with the current state of the art on small scale problems, and (b) achieves the current state of the art as the number of classes and sources grows, with minimal computational requirements.
Over the last years, several authors have signaled that state of the art categorization methods fail to perform well when trained and tested on data from different databases. The general consensus in the literature is that this issue, known as domain adaptation and or dataset bias, is due to a distribution mismatch between data collections. Methods addressing it go from max-margin classifiers to learning how to modify the features and obtain a more robust representation. The large majority of these works use BOW feature descriptors, and learning methods based on image-to-image distance functions. Following the seminal work of [6], in this paper we challenge these two assumptions. We experimentally show that using the NBNN classifier over existing domain adaptation databases achieves always very strong performances. We build on this result, and present an NBNN-based domain adaptation algorithm that learns iteratively a class metric while inducing, for each sample, a large margin separation among classes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work casting the domain adaptation problem within the NBNN framework. Experiments show that our method achieves the state of the art, both in the unsupervised and semi-supervised settings.