Object recognition systems usually require fully complete manually labeled training data to train classifier. In this paper, we study the problem of object recognition, where the training samples are missing during the classifier learning stage, a task also known as zero-shot learning. We propose a novel zero-shot learning strategy that utilizes the topic model and hierarchical class concept. Our proposed method advanced where cumbersome human annotation stage (i.e., attribute-based classification) is eliminated. We achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art algorithms in four public datasets: PubFig ( @math ), Cifar-100 ( @math ), Caltech-256 ( @math ), and Animals with Attributes ( @math ), when unseen classes exist in the classification task.
@cite_5: We study the problem of object classification when training and test classes are disjoint, i.e. no training examples of the target classes are available. This setup has hardly been studied in computer vision research, but it is the rule rather than the exception, because the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes and for only a very few of them image, collections have been formed and annotated with suitable class labels. In this paper, we tackle the problem by introducing attribute-based classification. It performs object detection based on a human-specified high-level description of the target objects instead of training images. The description consists of arbitrary semantic attributes, like shape, color or even geographic information. Because such properties transcend the specific learning task at hand, they can be pre-learned, e.g. from image datasets unrelated to the current task. Afterwards, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In order to evaluate our method and to facilitate research in this area, we have assembled a new large-scale dataset, “Animals with Attributes”, of over 30,000 animal images that match the 50 classes in Osherson's classic table of how strongly humans associate 85 semantic attributes with animal classes. Our experiments show that by using an attribute layer it is indeed possible to build a learning object detection system that does not require any training images of the target classes.
@cite_14: 
@cite_23: We consider the problem of zero-shot learning, where the goal is to learn a classifier f : X → Y that must predict novel values of Y that were omitted from the training set. To achieve this, we define the notion of a semantic output code classifier (SOC) which utilizes a knowledge base of semantic properties of Y to extrapolate to novel classes. We provide a formalism for this type of classifier and study its theoretical properties in a PAC framework, showing conditions under which the classifier can accurately predict novel classes. As a case study, we build a SOC classifier for a neural decoding task and show that it can often predict words that people are thinking about from functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of their neural activity, even without training examples for those words.
Palatucci al @cite_23 showed that the attribute description of an instance or category is useful as a semantically meaningful intermediate representation to bridge the gap between low level features and high-level classes. Thus, the attributes facilitate transfer and zero-shot learning to alleviate issues of the lack of labeled training data, by expressing classes in terms of well-known attributes. This is followed by Lampert al @cite_5 @cite_14 that extended the work to animal categorization by introducing Direct Attributes Prediction (DAP) and Indirect Attributes Prediction (IAP).