Ensemble Projection for Semi-supervised Image Classification

Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 2072-2079

This paper investigates the problem of semi-supervised classification. Unlike previous methods to regularize classifying boundaries with unlabeled data, our method learns a new image representation from all available data (labeled and unlabeled) and performs plain supervised learning with the new feature. In particular, an ensemble of image prototype sets are sampled automatically from the available data, to represent a rich set of visual categories/attributes. Discriminative functions are then learned on these prototype sets, and image are represented by the concatenation of their projected values onto the prototypes (similarities to them) for further classification. Experiments on four standard datasets show three interesting phenomena: (1) our method consistently outperforms previous methods for semi-supervised image classification; (2) our method lets itself combine well with these methods; and (3) our method works well for self-taught image classification where unlabeled data are not coming from the same distribution as labeled ones, but rather from a random collection of images.