SuperPixel Based Angular Differences as a Mid-level Image Descriptor

This paper focuses on the object recognition task and aims at improving the accuracy with an emphasis on the feature extraction step. Feature extraction is widely used in image classification as an initial step in the pipeline. In this paper, we propose a method to explore the conventional feature extraction techniques from the perspective that mid-level information could be incorporated in order to obtain a superior scene description. We hypothesize that the commonly used pixel based low-level descriptions are useful but can be improved with the introduction of mid-level region information. Hence, we investigate super pixel based image representation to acquire such mid-level information in order to improve the classification accuracy. Detailed experimental evaluations on classification and retrieval tasks are performed in order to validate the proposed hypothesis. A consistent increase is observed in the mean average precision (MAP) score for different experimental scenarios and image categories.