Ambiguity or uncertainty is a pervasive element of many real-world decision-making processes. Variation in decisions is a norm in this situation when the same problem is posed to different subjects. Psychological and metaphysical research has proven that decision making by humans is subjective. It is influenced by many factors such as experience, age, background, etc. Scene understanding is one of the computer vision problems that fall into this category. Conventional methods relax this problem by assuming that scene images are mutually exclusive; therefore, they focus on developing different approaches to perform the binary classification tasks. In this paper, we show that scene images are nonmutually exclusive and propose the fuzzy qualitative rank classifier (FQRC) to tackle the aforementioned problems. The proposed FQRC provides a ranking interpretation instead of binary decision. Evaluations in terms of qualitative and quantitative measurements using large numbers and challenging public scene datasets have shown the effectiveness of our proposed method in modeling the nonmutually exclusive scene images.
We present a new approach to model visual scenes in image collections, based on local invariant features and probabilistic latent space models. Our formulation provides answers to three open questions:(l) whether the invariant local features are suitable for scene (rather than object) classification; (2) whether unsupennsed latent space models can be used for feature extraction in the classification task; and (3) whether the latent space formulation can discover visual co-occurrence patterns, motivating novel approaches for image organization and segmentation. Using a 9500-image dataset, our approach is validated on each of these issues. First, we show with extensive experiments on binary and multi-class scene classification tasks, that a bag-of-visterm representation, derived from local invariant descriptors, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Second, we show that probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) generates a compact scene representation, discriminative for accurate classification, and significantly more robust when less training data are available. Third, we have exploited the ability of PLSA to automatically extract visually meaningful aspects, to propose new algorithms for aspect-based image ranking and context-sensitive image segmentation.