Automatic Image Attribute Selection for Zero-Shot Learning of Object Categories

Recently the use of image attributes as image descriptors has drawn great attention. This is because the resulting descriptors extracted using these attributes are human understandable as well as machine readable. Although the image attributes are generally semantically meaningful, they may not be discriminative. As such, prior works often consider a discriminative learning approach that could discover discriminative attributes. Nevertheless, the resulting learned attributes could lose their semantic meaning. To that end, in the present work, we study two properties of attributes: discriminative power and reliability. We then propose a novel greedy algorithm called Discriminative and Reliable Attribute Learning (DRAL) which selects a subset of attributes which maximises an objective function incorporating the two properties. We compare our proposed system to the recent state-of-the-art approach, called Direct Attribute Prediction (DAP) for the zero-shot learning task on the Animal with Attributes (AwA) dataset. The results show that our proposed approach can achieve similar performance to this state-of-the-art approach while using a significantly smaller number of attributes.