Efficient Bag of Scenes Analysis for Image Categorization

In this paper, we address the general problem of image/object categorization with a novel approach referred to as Bag-of-Scenes (BoS).Our approach is efficient for low semantic applications such as texture classification as well as for higher semantic tasks such as natural scenes recognition or fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC). It is based on the widely used combination of i) Sparse coding (Sc), ii) Max-pooling and iii) Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) techniques applied to histograms of multi-scale Local Binary/Ternary Patterns (LBP/LTP) and its improved variants. This approach can be considered as a two-layer hierarchical architecture: the first layer encodes the local spatial patch structure via histograms of LBP/LTP while the second encodes the relationships between pre-analyzed LBP/LTP-scenes/objects. Our method outperforms SIFT-based approaches using Sc techniques and can be trained efficiently with a simple linear SVM.