Exemplar codes for facial attributes and tattoo recognition

When implementing real-world computer vision systems, researchers can use mid-level representations as a tool to adjust the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Unfortunately, existing mid-level representations that improve accuracy tend to decrease efficiency, or are specifically tailored to work well within one pipeline or vision problem at the exclusion of others. We introduce a novel, efficient mid-level representation that improves classification efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. Our Exemplar Codes are based on linear classifiers and probability normalization from extreme value theory. We apply Exemplar Codes to two problems: facial attribute extraction and tattoo classification. In these settings, our Exemplar Codes are competitive with the state of the art and offer efficiency benefits, making it possible to achieve high accuracy even on commodity hardware with a low computational budget.