Group-Sensitive Multiple Kernel Learning for Object Recognition

In this paper, a group-sensitive multiple kernel learning (GS-MKL) method is proposed for object recognition to accommodate the intraclass diversity and the interclass correlation. By introducing the “group” between the object category and individual images as an intermediate representation, GS-MKL attempts to learn group-sensitive multikernel combinations together with the associated classifier. For each object category, the image corpus from the same category is partitioned into groups. Images with similar appearance are partitioned into the same group, which corresponds to the subcategory of the object category. Accordingly, intraclass diversity can be represented by the set of groups from the same category but with diverse appearances; interclass correlation can be represented by the correlation between groups from different categories. GS-MKL provides a tractable solution to adapt multikernel combination to local data distribution and to seek a tradeoff between capturing the diversity and keeping the invariance for each object category. Different from the simple hybrid grouping strategy that solves sample grouping and GS-MKL training independently, two sample grouping strategies are proposed to integrate sample grouping and GS-MKL training. The first one is a looping hybrid grouping method, where a global kernel clustering method and GS-MKL interact with each other by sharing group-sensitive multikernel combination. The second one is a dynamic divisive grouping method, where a hierarchical kernel-based grouping process interacts with GS-MKL. Experimental results show that performance of GS-MKL does not significantly vary with different grouping strategies, but the looping hybrid grouping method produces slightly better results. On four challenging data sets, our proposed method has achieved encouraging performance comparable to the state-of-the-art and outperformed several existing MKL methods.