Multi-scale and discriminative part detectors based features for multi-label image classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown their promise for image classification task. However, global CNN features still lack geometric invariance for addressing the problem of intra-class variations and so are not optimal for multi-label image classification. This paper proposes a new and effective framework built upon CNNs to learn Multi-scale and Discriminative Part Detectors (MsDPD)-based feature representations for multi-label image classification. Specifically, at each scale level, we (i) first present an entropy-rank based scheme to generate and select a set of discriminative part detectors (DPD), and then (ii) obtain a number of DPD-based convolutional feature maps with each feature map representing the occurrence probability of a particular part detector and learn DPD-based features by using a task-driven pooling scheme. The two steps are formulated into a unified framework by developing a new objective function, which jointly trains part detectors incrementally and integrates the learning of feature representations into the classification task. Finally, the multi-scale features are fused to produce the predictions. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2007 and VOC 2012 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better accuracy when compared with the existing state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.