A Weakly Supervised Fine Label Classifier Enhanced by Coarse Supervision

By Fariborz Taherkhani, Hadi Kazemi, Ali Dabouei, Jeremy M. Dawson, Nasser M. Nasrabadi. 2019

31 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objects are usually organized in a hierarchical structure in which each coarse category (e.g., big cat) corresponds to a superclass of several fine categories (e.g., cheetah, leopard). The objects grouped within the same coarse category, but in different fine categories, usually share a set of global visual features; however, these objects have distinctive local properties that characterize them at a fine level. This paper addresses the challenge of fine image classification in a weakly supervised fashion, whereby a subset of images is tagged by fine labels, while the remaining are tagged by coarse labels. We propose a new deep model that leverages coarse images to improve the classification performance of fine images within the coarse category. Our model is an end to end framework consisting of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which uses both fine and coarse images to tune its parameters. The CNN outputs are then fanned out into two separate branches such that the first branch uses a supervised low rank self expressive layer to project the CNN outputs to the low rank subspaces to capture the global structures for the coarse classification, while the other branch uses a supervised sparse self expressive layer to project them to the sparse subspaces to capture the local structures for the fine classification. Our deep model uses coarse images in conjunction with fine images to jointly explore the low rank and sparse subspaces by sharing the parameters during the training which causes the data points obtained by the CNN to be well-projected to both sparse and low rank subspaces for classification.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Mechanics, Media Technology, Optimization & Training

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Citations in the corpus

Grafit: Learning fine-grained image representations with coarse labels (2020, background): “In some works on hierarchical image classification [19, 26, 45, 49], a coarse annotation is available for all training images, but only a subset of the training images are labelled at a fine granularity.”