Unsupervised Discovery of Mid-Level Discriminative Patches
This addresses the need for unsupervised visual representations in computer vision, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing clustering and classification methods.
The paper tackles the problem of discovering discriminative patches for unsupervised mid-level visual representation by posing it as an unsupervised discriminative clustering problem, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Indoor-67 dataset for scene classification.
The goal of this paper is to discover a set of discriminative patches which can serve as a fully unsupervised mid-level visual representation. The desired patches need to satisfy two requirements: 1) to be representative, they need to occur frequently enough in the visual world; 2) to be discriminative, they need to be different enough from the rest of the visual world. The patches could correspond to parts, objects, "visual phrases", etc. but are not restricted to be any one of them. We pose this as an unsupervised discriminative clustering problem on a huge dataset of image patches. We use an iterative procedure which alternates between clustering and training discriminative classifiers, while applying careful cross-validation at each step to prevent overfitting. The paper experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of discriminative patches as an unsupervised mid-level visual representation, suggesting that it could be used in place of visual words for many tasks. Furthermore, discriminative patches can also be used in a supervised regime, such as scene classification, where they demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Indoor-67 dataset.