Improved learning of I2C distance and accelerating the neighborhood search for image classification

Image-To-Class (I2C) distance is a novel measure for image classification and has successfully handled datasets with large intra-class variances. However, due to the lack of a training phase, the performance of this distance is easily affected by irrelevant local features that may hurt the classification accuracy. Besides, the success of this I2C distance relies heavily on the large number of local features in the training set, which requires expensive computation cost for classifying test images. On the other hand, if there are small number of local features in the training set, it may result in poor performance. In this paper, we propose a distance learning method to improve the classification accuracy of this I2C distance as well as two strategies for accelerating its NN search. We first propose a large margin optimization framework to learn the I2C distance function, which is modeled as a weighted combination of the distance from every local feature in an image to its nearest neighbor (NN) in a candidate class. We learn these weights associated with local features in the training set by constraining the optimization such that the I2C distance from image to its belonging class should be less than that to any other class. We evaluate the proposed method on several publicly available image datasets and show that the performance of I2C distance for classification can significantly be improved by learning a weighted I2C distance function. To improve the computation cost, we also propose two methods based on spatial division and hubness score to accelerate the NN search, which is able to largely reduce the on-line testing time while still preserving or even achieving a better classification accuracy. Preprint submitted to Pattern Recognition December 28, 2010