A discriminative framework for modelling object classes

Here we explore a discriminative learning method on underlying generative models for the purpose of discriminating between object categories. Visual recognition algorithms learn models from a set of training examples. Generative models learn their representations by considering data from a single class. Generative models are popular in computer vision for many reasons, including their ability to elegantly incorporate prior knowledge and to handle correspondences between object parts and detected features. However, generative models are often inferior to discriminative models during classification tasks. We study a discriminative approach to learning object categories which maintains the representational power of generative learning, but trains the generative models in a discriminative manner. The discriminatively trained models perform better during classification tasks as a result of selecting discriminative sets of features. We conclude by proposing a multi-class object recognition system which initially trains object classes in a generative manner, identifies subsets of similar classes with high confusion, and finally trains models for these subsets in a discriminative manner to realize gains in classification performance.