OPTIMOL: automatic Online Picture collecTion via Incremental MOdel Learning

A well-built dataset is a necessary starting point for advanced computer vision research. It plays a crucial role in evaluation and provides a continuous challenge to state-of-the-art algorithms. Dataset collection is, however, a tedious and time-consuming task. This paper presents a novel automatic dataset collecting and model learning approach that uses object recognition techniques in an incremental method. The goal of this work is to use the tremendous resources of the web to learn robust object category models in order to detect and search for objects in real-world cluttered scenes. It mimics the human learning process of iteratively accumulating model knowledge and image examples. We adapt a non-parametric graphical model and propose an incremental learning framework. Our algorithm is capable of automatically collecting much larger object category datasets for 22 randomly selected classes from the Caltech 101 dataset. Furthermore, we offer not only more images in each object category dataset, but also a robust object model and meaningful image annotation. Our experiments show that OPTIMOL is capable of collecting image datasets that are superior to Caltech 101 and LabelMe.