Multicriteria-Based Active Discriminative Dictionary Learning for Scene Recognition

Scene recognition is a significant and challenging problem in the field of computer vision. One of the principal bottlenecks in applying machine learning techniques to scene recognition tasks is the requirement of a large number of labeled training data. However, labeling massive training data manually (especially labeling images and videos) is very expensive in terms of human time and effort. In this paper, we present a novel multicriteria-based active discriminative dictionary learning (M-ADDL) algorithm to reduce the human annotation effort and create a robust scene recognition model. The M-ADDL algorithm possesses three advantages. First, M-ADDL introduces an active learning strategy into the discriminative dictionary learning model so that the performance of discriminative dictionary learning can be improved when the number of labeled samples is small. Second, different from most existing active learning methods that measure either the informativeness or representativeness of unlabeled samples to select useful samples for expanding the training dataset, M-ADDL employs both informativeness and representativeness to query useful unlabeled samples and utilizes the manifold-preserving ability of unlabeled samples as an additional sample selection criterion. Finally, a more effective representativeness criterion is presented based on the reconstruction coefficients of the samples. The experimental results of four standard scene recognition databases demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposed M-ADDL algorithm.