Part-based representations have been shown to be very useful for image classification. Learning part-based models is often viewed as a two-stage problem. First, a collection of informative parts is discovered, using heuristics that promote part distinctiveness and diversity, and then classifiers are trained on the vector of part responses. In this paper we unify the two stages and learn the image classifiers and a set of shared parts jointly. We generate an initial pool of parts by randomly sampling part candidates and selecting a good subset using L1 L2 regularization. All steps are driven "directly" by the same objective namely the classification loss on a training set. This lets us do away with engineered heuristics. We also introduce the notion of "negative parts", intended as parts that are negatively correlated with one or more classes. Negative parts are complementary to the parts discovered by other methods, which look only for positive correlations.
@cite_13: Currently, Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) and part-based methods are the most popular approaches for visual recognition. In both cases, a mid-level representation is built on top of low-level image descriptors and top-level classifiers use this mid-level representation to achieve visual recognition. While in current part-based approaches, mid- and top-level representations are usually jointly trained, this is not the usual case for BoVW schemes. A main reason for this is the complex data association problem related to the usual large dictionary size needed by BoVW approaches. As a further observation, typical solutions based on BoVW and part-based representations are usually limited to extensions of binary classification schemes, a strategy that ignores relevant correlations among classes. In this work we propose a novel hierarchical approach to visual recognition based on a BoVW scheme that jointly learns suitable mid- and top-level representations. Furthermore, using a max-margin learning framework, the proposed approach directly handles the multiclass case at both levels of abstraction. We test our proposed method using several popular benchmark datasets. As our main result, we demonstrate that, by coupling learning of mid- and top-level representations, the proposed approach fosters sharing of discriminative visual words among target classes, being able to achieve state-of-the-art recognition performance using far less visual words than previous approaches.
@cite_2: In this paper, we show how to train a deformable part model (DPM) fast-typically in less than 20 minutes, or four times faster than the current fastest method-while maintaining high average precision on the PASCAL VOC datasets. At the core of our approach is "latent LDA," a novel generalization of linear discriminant analysis for learning latent variable models. Unlike latent SVM, latent LDA uses efficient closed-form updates and does not require an expensive search for hard negative examples. Our approach also acts as a springboard for a detailed experimental study of DPM training. We isolate and quantify the impact of key training factors for the first time (e.g., How important are discriminative SVM filters? How important is joint parameter estimation? How many negative images are needed for training?). Our findings yield useful insights for researchers working with Markov random fields and part-based models, and have practical implications for speeding up tasks such as model selection.
It has been shown before ( @cite_2 ) that joint training is important for the success of part-based models in object detection. Differently from them, however, we share parts among multiple classes and define a joint optimization in which multiple classifiers are learned concurrently. In particular, the same part can vote strongly for a subset of the classes and against another subset. The most closely related work to ours is ( @cite_13 ). Their model has two sets of parameters; a dictionary of visual words @math and a set of weights @math that specifies the importance the visual words in each category. Similar to what we do here, @cite_13 trains @math and @math jointly (visual words would be the equivalent of part filters in our terminology). However, they assume that @math is non-negative. This assumption does not allow for negative parts'' as we describe in Section .