Category Specific Dictionary Learning for Attribute Specific Feature Selection

Attributes, as mid-level features, have demonstrated great potential in visual recognition tasks due to their excellent propagation capability through different categories. However, existing attribute learning methods are prone to learning the correlated attributes. To discover the genuine attribute specific features, many feature selection methods have been proposed. However, these feature selection methods are implemented at the level of raw features that might be very noisy, and these methods usually fail to consider the structural information in the feature space. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a label constrained dictionary learning approach combined with a multilayer filter. The feature selection is implemented at dictionary level, which can better preserve the structural information. The label constrained dictionary learning suppresses the intra-class noise by encouraging the sparse representations of intra-class samples to lie close to their center. A multilayer filter is developed to discover the representative and robust attribute specific bases. The attribute specific bases are only shared among the positive samples or the negative samples. The experiments on the challenging Animals with Attributes data set and the SUN attribute data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.