Features in Concert: Discriminative Feature Selection meets Unsupervised Clustering

Feature selection is an essential problem in computer vision, important for category learning and recognition. Along with the rapid development of a wide variety of visual features and classifiers, there is a growing need for efficient feature selection and combination methods, to construct powerful classifiers for more complex and higher-level recognition tasks. We propose an algorithm that efficiently discovers sparse, compact representations of input features or classifiers, from a vast sea of candidates, with important optimality properties, low computational cost and excellent accuracy in practice. Different from boosting, we start with a discriminant linear classification formulation that encourages sparse solutions. Then we obtain an equivalent unsupervised clustering problem that jointly discovers ensembles of diverse features. They are independently valuable but even more powerful when united in a cluster of classifiers. We evaluate our method on the task of large-scale recognition in video and show that it significantly outperforms classical selection approaches, such as AdaBoost and greedy forward-backward selection, and powerful classifiers such as SVMs, in speed of training and performance, especially in the case of limited training data.