Deep sparse representation-based mid-level visual elements discovery in fine-grained classification

In this paper, we propose a new mid-level visual elements discovery method and apply it to the fine-grained classification. We present the duality between image patches and features extracted by the convolutional winner-take-all autoencoder (CONV-WTA-AE). The sparsity constraints used by CONV-WTA-AE make a group of objects sharing the same feature components. Hence, the image patches could be clustered by their sharing feature components and the feature components can be clustered by their co-occurrence in the image patches. We propose formulating the mid-level visual elements mining as a bipartite graph partitioning problem. The spectral partitioning algorithm is employed to co-cluster image patches and feature components. The CONV-WTA-AE is an unsupervised feature learning method. Hence, it avoids using expensive annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that the spectral partitioning method is very efficient but only the confident instances in a cluster are well discriminated. The similarity metric used by this algorithm is not accurate enough. Hence, we propose training a group of linear support vector machine (SVM) to refine the clustering results. These SVMs will be trained on the initial confident instances and provide a better discriminative similarity. Then we can re-assign instances to each clusters. To avoid overfitting, this process is iterated on many data subsets. We conduct a series of experiments on the MNIST dataset to verify our algorithm. The experimental results show that our method can discover meaningful image patch clusters. In the fine-grained classification task, visual elements are input into an ensemble of convolutional neural networks. The experiments on the CompCars dataset illustrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance.