Differences Help Recognition: A Probabilistic Interpretation

This paper presents a computational model to address one prominent psychological behavior of human beings to recognize images. The basic pursuit of our method can be concluded as that differences among multiple images help visual recognition. Generally speaking, we propose a statistical framework to distinguish what kind of image features capture sufficient category information and what kind of image features are common ones shared in multiple classes. Mathematically, the whole formulation is subject to a generative probabilistic model. Meanwhile, a discriminative functionality is incorporated into the model to interpret the differences among all kinds of images. The whole Bayesian formulation is solved in an Expectation-Maximization paradigm. After finding those discriminative patterns among different images, we design an image categorization algorithm to interpret how these differences help visual recognition within the bag-of-feature framework. The proposed method is verified on a variety of image categorization tasks including outdoor scene images, indoor scene images as well as the airborne SAR images from different perspectives.