Incremental learning of latent structural SVM for weakly supervised image classification

Visual learning with weak supervision is a promising research area, since it offers the possibility to build large image datasets at reasonable cost. In this paper, we address the problem of weakly supervised object detection, where the goal is to predict the label of the image using object position as latent variable. We propose a new method that builds upon the Latent Structural SVM (LSSVM) formalism. Specifically, we introduce an original coarse-to-fine approach that limits the evolution of the latent parameter subspace. This incremental strategy drives the learning towards better solutions, providing a model with increased predictive accuracy. In addition, this leads to a significant speed up during learning and inference compared to standard sliding window methods. Experiments carried out on Mammal dataset validate the good performances and fast training of the method compared to state-of-the-art works.