Learning a Probabilistic Topology Discovering Model for Scene Categorization

A recent advance in scene categorization prefers a topological based modeling to capture the existence and relationships among different scene components. To that effect, local features are typically used to handle photographing variances such as occlusions and clutters. However, in many cases, the local features alone cannot well capture the scene semantics since they are extracted from tiny regions (e.g., 4 × 4 patches) within an image. In this paper, we mine a discriminative topology and a low-redundant topology from the local descriptors under a probabilistic perspective, which are further integrated into a boosting framework for scene categorization. In particular, by decomposing a scene image into basic components, a graphlet model is used to describe their spatial interactions. Accordingly, scene categorization is formulated as an intergraphlet matching problem. The above procedure is further accelerated by introducing a probabilistic based representative topology selection scheme that makes the pairwise graphlet comparison trackable despite their exponentially increasing volumes. The selected graphlets are highly discriminative and independent, characterizing the topological characteristics of scene images. A weak learner is subsequently trained for each topology, which are boosted together to jointly describe the scene image. In our experiment, the visualized graphlets demonstrate that the mined topological patterns are representative to scene categories, and our proposed method beats state-of-the-art models on five popular scene data sets.