Attribute constrained subspace learning

Visual attributes are high-level semantic descriptions of visual data that are close to the human language. They have been used intensively in various applications such as image classification, active learning, and interactive search. However, the usage of attributes in subspace learning (or dimensionality reduction) has not been considered yet. In this work, we propose to utilize relative attributes as semantic cues in subspace learning. To this end, we employ Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) constrained by embedded relative attributes to learn a subspace representation of image content. Experiments conducted on two datasets show the efficiency of attributes in discriminative subspace learning.