Sparse Based Image Classification With Bag-of-Visual-Words Representations

The sparse representation based classification algorithm has been used to solve the problem of human face recognition, but the image database is restricted to human frontal faces with only slight illumination and expression changes. This paper applies the sparse representation based algorithm to the problem of generic image classification, with a certain degree of intra-class variations and background clutter. Experiments are conducted with the sparse representation based algorithm and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers on 25 object categories selected from the Caltech101 dataset. Experimental results show that without the time-consuming parameter optimization, the sparse representation based algorithm achieves comparable performance with SVM. The experiments also demonstrate that the algorithm is robust to a certain degree of background clutter and intra-class variations with the bag-of-visual-words representations. The sparse representation based algorithm can also be applied to generic image classification task when the appropriate image feature is used. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2651-5.ch002