A feature fusion based localized multiple kernel learning system for real world image classification

Real-world image classification, which aims to determine the semantic class of un-labeled images, is a challenging task. In this paper, we focus on two challenges of image classification and propose a method to address both of them simultaneously. The first challenge is that representing images by heterogeneous features, such as color, shape and texture, helps to provide better classification accuracy. The second challenge comes from dissimilarities in the visual appearance of images from the same class (intra class variance) and similarities between images from different classes (inter class relationship). In addition to these two challenges, we should note that the feature space of real-world images is highly complex so they cannot be linearly classified. The kernel trick is efficacious to classify them. This paper proposes a feature fusion based multiple kernel learning (MKL) model for image classification. By using multiple kernels extracted from multiple features, we address the first challenge. To provide a solution for the second challenge, we use the idea of a localized MKL by assigning separate local weights to each kernel. We employed spatial pyramid match (SPM) representation of images and computed kernel weights based on Χkernel. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model has achieved promising results.