Unsupervised visual domain adaptation via dictionary evolution

In real-word visual applications, distribution mismatch between samples from different domains may significantly degrade classification performance. To improve the generalization capability of classifier across domains, domain adaptation has attracted a lot of interest in computer vision. This work focuses on unsupervised domain adaptation which is still challenging because no labels are available in the target domain. Most of the attention has been dedicated to seeking domain-invariant feature by exploring the shared structure between domains, ignoring the valuable discriminative information contained in the labeled source data. In this paper, we propose a Dictionary Evolution (DE) approach to construct discriminative features robust to domain shift. Specifically, DE aims to adapt a discriminative dictionary learnt based on labeled source samples to unlabeled target samples through a gradual transition process. We show that the learnt dictionary is endowed with cross-domain data representation ability and powerful discriminant capability. Empirical results on real world data sets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach over competing methods.