Efficient Two-Step Middle-Level Part Feature Extraction for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Fine-grained visual categorization ( FGVC) has drawn increasing attention as an emerging research field in recent years. In contrast to generic-domain visual recognition, FGVC is characterized by high intraclass and subtle inter-class variations. To distinguish conceptually and visually similar categories, highly discriminative visual features must be extracted. Moreover, FGVC has highly specialized and task-specific nature. It is not always easy to obtain a sufficiently large-scale training dataset. Therefore, the key to success in practical FGVC systems is to efficiently exploit discriminative features from a limited number of training examples. In this paper, we propose an efficient two-step dimensionality compression method to derive compact middle-level part-based features. To do this, we compare both space-first and feature-first convolution schemes and investigate their effectiveness. Our approach is based on simple linear algebra and analytic solutions, and is highly scalable compared with the current one-vs-one or one-vs-all approach, making it possible to quickly train middlelevel features from a number of pairwise part regions. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method using the standard Caltech-Birds and Stanford-Cars datasets.