Learning Semantic Features for Visual Recognition

Visual recognition (e.g., object, scene and action recognition) is an active area of research in computer vision due to its increasing number of real-world applications such as video (image) indexing and search, intelligent surveillance, human-machine interaction, robot navigation, etc. Effective modeling of the objects, scenes and actions is critical for visual recognition. Recently, bag of visual words (BoVW) representation, in which the image patches or video cuboids are quantized into visual words (i.e., mid-level features) based on their appearance similarity using clustering, has been widely and successfully explored. The advantages of this representation are: no explicit detection of objects or object parts and their tracking are required; the representation is somewhat tolerant to within-class deformations, and it is efficient for matching. However, the performance of the BoVW is sensitive to the size of the visual vocabulary. Therefore, computationally expensive cross-validation is needed to find the appropriate quantization granularity. This limitation is partially due to the fact that the visual words are not semantically meaningful. This limits the effectiveness and compactness of the representation. To overcome these shortcomings, in this thesis we present principled approach to learn a semantic vocabulary (i.e. high-level features) from a large amount of visual words (mid-level features). In this context, the thesis makes two major contributions. First, we have developed an algorithm to discover a compact yet discriminative semantic vocabulary. This vocabulary is obtained by grouping the visual-words based on their distribution in videos (images) into visual-word clusters. The mutual information (MI) between the clusters and the videos (images) depicts the discriminative power of the semantic vocabulary, while the MI between visual-words and visual-word clusters measures the compactness of the vocabulary. We apply the information bottleneck (IB) algorithm to find the optimal number of visual-word clusters by finding the good tradeoff between compactness and discriminative power. We tested our proposed approach on the state-of-the-art KTH