Local Color Contrastive Descriptor for Image Classification

Image representation and classification are two fundamental tasks towards multimedia content retrieval and understanding. The idea that shape and texture information (e.g. edge or orientation) are the key features for visual representation is ingrained and dominated in current multimedia and computer vision communities. A number of low-level features have been proposed by computing local gradients (e.g. SIFT, LBP and HOG), and have achieved great successes on numerous multimedia applications. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient local descriptor for image classification, referred as Local Color Contrastive Descriptor (LCCD), by leveraging the neural mechanisms of color contrast. The idea originates from the observation in neural science that color and shape information are linked inextricably in visual cortical processing. The color contrast yields key information for visual color perception and provides strong linkage between color and shape. We propose a novel contrastive mechanism to compute the color contrast in both spatial location and multiple channels. The color contrast is computed by measuring \emph{f}-divergence between the color distributions of two regions. Our descriptor enriches local image representation with both color and contrast information. We verified experimentally that it can compensate strongly for the shape based descriptor (e.g. SIFT), while keeping computationally simple. Extensive experimental results on image classification show that our descriptor improves the performance of SIFT substantially by combinations, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmark datasets. It improves recent Deep Learning model (DeCAF) [1] largely from the accuracy of 40.94% to 49.68% in the large scale SUN397 database. Codes for the LCCD will be available.

Sheng Guo, Weilin Huang, Yu Qiao · 2015