Lasso screening for object categories recognition using multi-directional context features

Image representation using local features and sparse coding (SC) plays a very important role in image classification when the dataset is fairly large. Despite of its worldwide popularity, there are still some improving space in classification efficiency and computational investment in training and coding phrase of SC. In this paper, we put forward a novel object categories recognition method from two aspects. First, the contextual relevance between image patches are fully utilized by merging local feature of every sub-patch with its neighboring ones into strong context features to generate the multiple sparse representations, which are received by the SC and multi-scale max pooling SPM(Spatial Pyramid Matching), respectively. Second, while calculating the sparse coefficients of SC, we need to solve L1-regularized least square problem. Screening out the zero coefficients and discarding the corresponding inactive codewords before solving Lasso problem can remarkably speed up the optimization. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art performancein a large number of image categorization experiments on several benchmarks: the ground truth dataset (21 Land-Use database), the event dataset (UIUC-Sport dataset), and the object recognition dataset (Caltech101 dataset).

Image classification is an important problem in computer vision. The sparse coding spatial pyramid matching (ScSPM) framework is widely used in this field. However, the sparse coding cannot effectively handle very large training sets because of its high computational complexity, and ignoring the mutual dependence among local features results in highly variable sparse codes even for similar features. To overcome the shortcomings of previous sparse coding algorithm, we present an image classification method, which replaces the sparse dictionary with a stable dictionary learned via low computational complexity clustering, more specifically, a k-medoids cluster method optimized by k-means++. The proposed method can reduce the learning complexity and improve the feature’s stability. In the experiments, we compared the effectiveness of our method with the existing ScSPM method and its improved versions. We evaluated our approach on two diverse datasets: Caltech-101 and UIUC-Sports. The results show that our method can increase the accuracy of spatial pyramid matching, which suggests that our method is capable of improving performance of sparse coding features.

Recently support vector machines (SVM) using spatial pyramid matching (SPM) kernel have been highly successful in image classification applications. And linear spatial pyramid matching using sparse coding (ScSPM) scheme has been proposed to enhance the performance of SPM both in time and classification accuracy. In order to reduce the time complexity of dictionary construction process, sparse coding with affinity propagation method has been proposed in this paper. Because the dictionary used for sparse coding plays a key role in these methods, we also adopt supervised dictionary learning method to construct dictionary. The coding coefficients of each class have greater separability for SVM classification. Substantial experiments on Scene15 and CalTech101 image datasets have been conducted to investigate the performance of proposed approach in multi-class image classification; the results show that the approach can reach higher accuracy compared with ScSPM.

Recent research has shown the initial success of sparse coding (Sc) in solving many computer vision tasks. Motivated by the fact that kernel trick can capture the nonlinear similarity of features, which helps in finding a sparse representation of nonlinear features, we propose kernel sparse representation (KSR). Essentially, KSR is a sparse coding technique in a high dimensional feature space mapped by an implicit mapping function. We apply KSR to feature coding in image classification, face recognition, and kernel matrix approximation. More specifically, by incorporating KSR into spatial pyramid matching (SPM), we develop KSRSPM, which achieves a good performance for image classification. Moreover, KSR-based feature coding can be shown as a generalization of efficient match kernel and an extension of Sc-based SPM. We further show that our proposed KSR using a histogram intersection kernel (HIK) can be considered a soft assignment extension of HIK-based feature quantization in the feature coding process. Besides feature coding, comparing with sparse coding, KSR can learn more discriminative sparse codes and achieve higher accuracy for face recognition. Moreover, KSR can also be applied to kernel matrix approximation in large scale learning tasks, and it demonstrates its robustness to kernel matrix approximation, especially when a small fraction of the data is used. Extensive experimental results demonstrate promising results of KSR in image classification, face recognition, and kernel matrix approximation. All these applications prove the effectiveness of KSR in computer vision and machine learning tasks.

Fast low rank representation based spatial pyramid matching for image classification

Fast human action classification and VOI localization with enhanced sparse coding

Non-negativity and dependence constrained sparse coding for image classification

Image representation based on sparse coding generalizes the bag of words model. Although it reduces the reconstruction error for local features to achieve the state-of-the-art image classification performance, the large computational cost hinders the application of sparse coding-based image features. In this paper, we propose approximating a sparse code using the output of a simple neural network. The resulting parameter learning model for the neural network automatically incorporates non-negative and shift-invariant constraints, leading to an efficient normalized non-negative sparse coding (N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> SC) sparse encoder. Without the use of the traditional iterative process to solve the sparse coding objective, the sparse encoder directly “converts” each local feature into a sparse code. We also introduce a method for training the encoder based on the auto-encoder method. In addition, we formally propose the corresponding sparse coding scheme called N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> SC, which enforces both the non-negative constraint and the shift-invariant constraint in addition to the traditional sparse coding criteria. As demonstrated by several experiments, the obtained N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> SC encoder requires only 3%-10% of the processing time for image feature extraction compared with the standard sparse coding scheme. At the same time, the features extracted using the exact solutions of the N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> SC coding scheme and the N <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> SC encoder offer superior image classification accuracy compared to the accuracy of many existing sparse coding-based representations.

A sparse dictionary model for image superresolution is presented, which unifies the feature patches of high-resolution (HR) and low-resolution images using sparse dictionary coding. This method builds a sparse association between middle-frequency and high-frequency image components and realizes simultaneously match searching and optimization methods. Comparison with sparse coding method shows sparse dictionary is more compact and effective. Sparse K-SVD algorithm is applied for optimization to speed up sparse coding. Some experiments with real images show that our method outperforms other learning-based super-resolution algorithms.

Sparse coding which encodes the original signal in a sparse signal space, has shown its state-of-the-art performance in the visual codebook generation and feature quantization process of BoW based image representation. However, in the feature quantization process of sparse coding, some similar local features may be quantized into different visual words of the codebook due to the sensitiveness of quantization. In this paper, to alleviate the impact of this problem, we propose a Laplacian sparse coding method, which will exploit the dependence among the local features. Specifically, we propose to use histogram intersection based kNN method to construct a Laplacian matrix, which can well characterize the similarity of local features. In addition, we incorporate this Laplacian matrix into the objective function of sparse coding to preserve the consistence in sparse representation of similar local features. Comprehensive experimental results show that our method achieves or outperforms existing state-of-the-art results, and exhibits excellent performance on Scene 15 data set.

Non-negative and local sparse coding based on l2-norm and Hessian regularization

Sparse Coding is a widely used method to represent an image. However, sparse coding and its improved algorithms have the problem of complex computation and long running time and so on. For these problems, we propose an image classification method based on hash codes and space pyramid, which encodes local feature points with hash codes instead of sparse coding. Firstly, extract the local feature points from the images. Second, learn binary auto-encoder hashing functions, which map the local feature points into hash codes. Third, perform binary k-means cluster on the binary hash codes and generate the binary visual vocabularies. Finally, Combine with spatial pyramid matching model, and represent the image by the histogram vector of space pyramid, which is used in image classification. Experimental results show that compared with other sparse coding methods, our method has the shorter time of learning vocabularies and faster encoder speed and higher classification accuracy.

A new scene classification method is proposed based on the combination of local Gabor features with a spatial pyramid matching model. First, new local Gabor feature descriptors are extracted from dense sampling patches of scene images. These local feature descriptors are embedded into a bag-of-visual-words (BOVW) model, which is combined with a spatial pyramid matching framework. The new local Gabor feature descriptors have sufficient discrimination abilities for dense regions of scene images. Then the efficient feature vectors of scene images can be obtained byK-means clustering method and visual word statistics. Second, in order to decrease classification time and improve accuracy, an improved kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) method is applied to reduce the dimensionality of pyramid histogram of visual words (PHOW). The principal components with the bigger interclass separability are retained in feature vectors, which are used for scene classification by the linear support vector machine (SVM) method. The proposed method is evaluated on three commonly used scene datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Content-based 3D shape retrieval (CBR) become a central research topic in the field of pattern recognition. The primary challenge for CBR methods is to extract proper features for discriminating diverse shapes of 3D models with non-rigid deformations. The bag-of-features (BoF) paradigm and Local Feature Descriptors (LFDs) have demonstrated impressive levels of performance. The success of this approach prompted several extensions to BoF, such as sparse coding approach. In this study, state-of-the-art content-based 3D shape retrieval methods based on local features and sparse coding are investigated in detail. Performance of the well-known local spectral descriptors (GPS, HKS, SIHKS, WKS and meshSIFT) is tested with several algorithms for dictionaries learning and coefficient learning. Experiments are performed on the standard dataset Shrec11 with different scenarios.

Local structure preserving discriminative projections for RGB-D sensor-based scene classification