Learning discriminative local features from image-level labelled data for colonoscopy image classification

In this paper we propose a novel weakly-supervised feature learning approach, learning discriminative local features from image-level labelled data for image classification. Unlike existing feature learning approaches which assume that a set of additional data in the form of matching/non-matching pairs of local patches are given for learning the features, our approach only uses the image-level labels which are much easier to obtain. Experiments on a colonoscopy image dataset with 2100 images shows that the learned local features outperforms other hand-crafted features and gives a state-or-the-art classification accuracy of 93.5%.