This paper presents a method for recognizing scene categories based on approximate global geometric correspondence. This technique works by partitioning the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computing histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. The resulting “spatial pyramid ” is a simple and computationally efficient extension of an orderless bag-of-features image representation, and it shows significantly improved performance on challenging scene categorization tasks. Specifically, our proposed method exceeds the state of the art on the Caltech-101 database and achieves high accuracy on a large database of fifteen natural scene categories. The spatial pyramid framework also offers insights into the success of several recently proposed image descriptions, including Torralba’s “gist ” and Lowe’s SIFT descriptors. 1.

We present a new approach for modeling multi-modal data sets, focusing on the specific case of segmented images with associated text. Learning the joint distribution of image regions and words has many applications. We consider in detail predicting words associated with whole images (auto-annotation) and corresponding to particular image regions (region naming). Auto-annotation might help organize and access large collections of images. Region naming is a model of object recognition as a process of translating image regions to words, much as one might translate from one language to another. Learning the relationships between image regions and semantic correlates (words) is an interesting example of multi-modal data mining, particularly because it is typically hard to apply data mining techniques to collections of images. We develop a number of models for the joint distribution of image regions and words, including several which explicitly learn the correspondence between regions and words. We study multi-modal and correspondence extensions to Hofmann’s hierarchical clustering/aspect model, a translation model adapted from statistical machine translation (Brown et al.), and a multi-modal extension to mixture of latent Dirichlet allocation

program. The authors wish to acknowledge helpful discussions with Lancelot James and Jim Pitman and the referees for useful comments. 1 We consider problems involving groups of data, where each observation within a group is a draw from a mixture model, and where it is desirable to share mixture components between groups. We assume that the number of mixture components is unknown a priori and is to be inferred from the data. In this setting it is natural to consider sets of Dirichlet processes, one for each group, where the well-known clustering property of the Dirichlet process provides a nonparametric prior for the number of mixture components within each group. Given our desire to tie the mixture models in the various groups, we consider a hierarchical model, specifically one in which the base measure for the child Dirichlet processes is itself distributed according to a Dirichlet process. Such a base measure being discrete, the child Dirichlet processes necessar-ily share atoms. Thus, as desired, the mixture models in the different groups necessarily share mixture components. We discuss representations of hierarchical Dirichlet processes in terms of

We propose a novel approach to learn and recognize natural scene categories. Unlike previous work [9, 17], it does not require experts to annotate the training set. We represent the image of a scene by a collection of local regions, denoted as codewords obtained by unsupervised learning. Each region is represented as part of a “theme”. In previous work, such themes were learnt from hand-annotations of experts, while our method learns the theme distributions as well as the codewords distribution over the themes without supervision. We report satisfactory categorization performances on a large set of 13 categories of complex scenes. 1.

We review the literature on semi-supervised learning, which is an area in machine learning and more generally, artificial intelligence. There has been a whole spectrum of interesting ideas on how to learn from both labeled and unlabeled data, i.e. semi-supervised learning. This document is a chapter excerpt from the author’s doctoral thesis (Zhu, 2005). However the author plans to update the online version frequently to incorporate the latest development in the field. Please obtain the latest version at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/pub/ssl_survey.pdf

Scientists need new tools to explore and browse large collections of scholarly literature. Thanks to organizations such as JSTOR, which scan and index the original bound archives of many journals, modern scientists can search digital libraries spanning hundreds of years. A scientist, suddenly

We consider the problem of modeling annotated data—data with multiple types where the instance of one type (such as a caption) serves as a description of the other type (such as an image). We describe three hierarchical probabilistic mixture models that are aimed at such data, culminating in the Corr-LDA model, a latent variable model that is effective at modeling the joint distribution of both types and the conditional distribution of the annotation given the primary type. We take an empirical Bayes approach to finding parameter estimates and conduct experiments in held-out likelihood, automatic annotation, and text-based image retrieval using the Corel database of images and captions. 1

Imagine a video taken on a sunny beach, can a computer automatically tell what is happening in the scene? Can it identify different human activities in the video, such as water surfing, people walking and lying on the beach? To automatically classify or localize different actions in video sequences is very useful for a variety of tasks, such as video surveillance, objectlevel video summarization, video indexing, digital library organization, etc. However, it remains a challenging task for computers to achieve robust action recognition due to cluttered background, camera motion, occlusion, and geometric and photometric variances of objects. For example, in a live video of a skating competition, the skater moves rapidly across the rink, and the camera also moves to follow the skater. With moving camera, non-stationary background, and moving target, few vision algorithms could identify, categorize and

Current approaches to object category recognition require datasets of training images to be manually prepared, with varying degrees of supervision. We present an approach that can learn an object category from just its name, by utilizing the raw output of image search engines available on the Internet. We develop a new model, TSI-pLSA, which extends pLSA (as applied to visual words) to include spatial information in a translation and scale invariant manner. Our approach can handle the high intra-class variability and large proportion of unrelated images returned by search engines. We evaluate the models on standard test sets, showing performance competitive with existing methods trained on hand prepared datasets. 1.

We introduce the author-topic model, a generative model for documents that extends Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA; Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003) to include authorship information. Each author is associated with a multinomial distribution over topics and each topic is associated with a multinomial distribution over words. A document with multiple authors is modeled as a distribution over topics that is a mixture of the distributions associated with the authors. We apply the model to a collection of 1,700 NIPS conference papers and 160,000 CiteSeer abstracts. Exact inference is intractable for these datasets and we use Gibbs sampling to estimate the topic and author distributions. We compare the performance with two other generative models for documents, which are special cases of the author-topic model: LDA (a topic model) and a simple author model in which each author is associated with a distribution over words rather than a distribution over topics. We show topics recovered by the author-topic model, and demonstrate applications to computing similarity between authors and entropy of author output.