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Improving Image Classification Using Semantic Attributes

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Abstract

The Bag-of-Words (BoW) model—commonly used for image classification—has two strong limitations: on one hand, visual words are lacking of explicit meanings, on the other hand, they are usually polysemous. This paper proposes to address these two limitations by introducing an intermediate representation based on the use of semantic attributes. Specifically, two different approaches are proposed. Both approaches consist in predicting a set of semantic attributes for the entire images as well as for local image regions, and in using these predictions to build the intermediate level features. Experiments on four challenging image databases (PASCAL VOC 2007, Scene-15, MSRCv2 and SUN-397) show that both approaches improve performance of the BoW model significantly. Moreover, their combination achieves the state-of-the-art results on several of these image databases.

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Acknowledgement

This work was partly realized under the Quaero Programme, funded by OSEO, French State agency for innovation.

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Correspondence to Yu Su.

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Su, Y., Jurie, F. Improving Image Classification Using Semantic Attributes. Int J Comput Vis 100, 59–77 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-012-0529-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-012-0529-4

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