Dog breed classification via landmarks

Object recognition is an important problem with a wide range of applications. It is also a challenging problem, especially for animal categorization as the differences among breeds can be subtle. In this paper, based on statistical techniques for landmark-based shape representation, we propose to model the shape of dog breed as points on the Grassmann manifold. We consider the dog breed categorization as the classification problem on this manifold. The proposed scheme is tested on a dataset including 8,351 images of 133 different breeds. Experimental results demonstrate the advocated scheme outperforms state of the art approaches by nearly 20%.