Autogrouped Sparse Representation for Visual Analysis

In image classification, recognition or retrieval systems, image contents are commonly described by global features. However, the global features generally contain noise from the background, occlusion, or irrelevant objects in the images. Thus, only part of the global feature elements is informative for describing the objects of interest and useful for the image analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose algorithms to automatically discover the subgroups of highly correlated feature elements within predefined global features. To this end, we first propose a novel mixture sparse regression (MSR) method, which groups the elements of a single vector according to the membership conveyed by their sparse regression coefficients. Based on MSR, we proceed to develop the autogrouped sparse representation (ASR), which groups correlated feature elements together through fusing their individual sparse representations over multiple samples. We apply ASR/MSR in two practical visual analysis tasks: 1) multilabel image classification and 2) motion segmentation. Comprehensive experimental evaluations show that our proposed methods are able to achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art classification on these two tasks.