Mixture component identification and learning for visual recognition

• The non-linear decision boundary between object and background classes - due to large intra-class variations - needs to be modelled by any classifier wishing to achieve good results. While a mixture of linear classifiers is capable of modelling this non-linearity, learning this mixture from weakly annotated data is non-trivial and is the paper's focus. Our approach is to identify the modes in the distribution of our positive examples by clustering, and to utilize this clustering in a latent SVM formulation to learn the mixture model. The clustering relies on a robust measure of visual similarity which suppresses uninformative clutter by using a novel representation based on the exemplar SVM. This subtle clustering of the data leads to learning better mixture models, as is demonstrated via extensive evaluations on Pascal VOC 2007. The final classifier, using a HOG representation of the global image patch, achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art while being more efficient at detection time.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorseende och robotik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Vision and Robotics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Decision boundary

Detection time

Image patches

Intra-class variation

Linear classifiers

Mixture components

Mixture model

Non-Linearity

Non-trivial

Positive examples

Visual recognition

Visual similarity

Weakly annotated data

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)