Lie Algebrized Gaussians for Image Representation
This addresses scene category recognition for computer vision applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Gaussian mixture model and Lie group methods.
The authors tackled image representation by modeling images with Gaussian mixture models adapted from a universal background model and vectorizing them using Lie group theory, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the 15Scenes benchmark.
We present an image representation method which is derived from analyzing Gaussian probability density function (\emph{pdf}) space using Lie group theory. In our proposed method, images are modeled by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) which are adapted from a globally trained GMM called universal background model (UBM). Then we vectorize the GMMs based on two facts: (1) components of image-specific GMMs are closely grouped together around their corresponding component of the UBM due to the characteristic of the UBM adaption procedure; (2) Gaussian \emph{pdf}s form a Lie group, which is a differentiable manifold rather than a vector space. We map each Gaussian component to the tangent vector space (named Lie algebra) of Lie group at the manifold position of UBM. The final feature vector, named Lie algebrized Gaussians (LAG) is then constructed by combining the Lie algebrized Gaussian components with mixture weights. We apply LAG features to scene category recognition problem and observe state-of-the-art performance on 15Scenes benchmark.