Class-specific image representation for image classification using multiple scale-invariant region detectors

We propose a new class-specific image representation for image classification using multiple region detectors. The new representation is designed to solve the problem of increasing variation in object location and size within images of a class, for which traditional spatial pyramid matching shows limited classification accuracy. We propose a new region-division method that divides the image region into two class-specific regions, called class-specific region-of-interest (C-ROI) and focal region (FR). Using multiple region detectors and appropriate mixing of their responses avoids the problem of selecting a region detector that gives the best classification accuracy for a given image class, and thereby yields better results than using only one region detector. Several scale-invariant region detectors are used to obtain C-ROI and FR by considering their importance over a given image class. In experiments using several well-known datasets, the proposed method improved the accuracy and achieved results that were better than or comparable to those achieved by the related methods.