Subcategory-Aware Object Classification

Jian Dong, Wei Xia, Qiang Chen, Jianshi Feng, Zhongyang Huang, Shuicheng Yan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 827-834

In this paper, we introduce a subcategory-aware object classification framework to boost category level object classification performance. Motivated by the observation of considerable intra-class diversities and inter-class ambiguities in many current object classification datasets, we explicitly split data into subcategories by ambiguity guided subcategory mining. We then train an individual model for each subcategory rather than attempt to represent an object category with a monolithic model. More specifically, we build the instance affinity graph by combining both intraclass similarity and inter-class ambiguity. Visual subcategories, which correspond to the dense subgraphs, are detected by the graph shift algorithm and seamlessly integrated into the state-of-the-art detection assisted classification framework. Finally the responses from subcategory models are aggregated by subcategory-aware kernel regression. The extensive experiments over the PASCAL VOC 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2010 databases show the state-ofthe-art performance from our framework.