Visual Recognition by Learning From Web Data: A Weakly Supervised Domain Generalization Approach

Li Niu, Wen Li, Dong Xu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 2774-2783

Abstract


In this work, we formulate a new weakly supervised domain generalization problem for the visual recognition task by using loosely labeled web images/videos as training data. Specifically, we aim to address two challenging issues when learning robust classifiers: 1) enhancing the generalization capability of the learnt classifiers to any unseen target domain; and 2) coping with noise in the labels of training web images/videos in the source domain. To address the first issue, we assume the training web images/videos may come from multiple hidden domains with different data distributions. We then extend the multi-class SVM formulation to learn one classifier for each class and each latent domain such that multiple classifiers from each class can be effectively integrated to achieve better generalization capability. To address the second issue, we partition the training samples in each class into multiple clusters. By treating each cluster as a "bag" and the samples in each cluster as "instances", we formulate a new multi-instance learning (MIL) problem for domain generalization by selecting a subset of training samples from each training bag and simultaneously learning the optimal classifiers based on the selected samples. Moreover, we also extend our newly proposed Weakly Supervised Domain Generalization (WSDG) approach by taking advantage of the additional textual descriptions that are only available in the training web images/videos as privileged information. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approaches for visual recognition by learning from web data.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Niu_2015_CVPR,
author = {Niu, Li and Li, Wen and Xu, Dong},
title = {Visual Recognition by Learning From Web Data: A Weakly Supervised Domain Generalization Approach},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2015}
}