Natural scene recognition based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Deep Boltzmannn Machines

Scene recognition is a significant topic in computer vision, and Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBM) is a state-of-the-art deep learning model which has been widely applied in object and hand written digit recognition. However, when the DBM is used in scene recognition, it is difficult to handle large images due to its computational complexity. In this paper, we present a deep learning method based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and DBM for scene image recognition. First, in order to categorize large images, the CNN is utilized to preprocess images for dimensional reduction. Then, regarding the preprocessed images as the input of the visible layer, the DBM model is trained using Contrastive Divergence (CD) algorithm. Finally, after extracting features by the DBM, the softmax regression is employed to perform scene recognition tasks. Since the CNN can reduce effectively image size, the proposed method can improve the computational efficiency and becomes more suitable for large image recognition. Experimental evaluations using SIFT Flow dataset and fifteen-scene dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain promising results.