A Novel Method for Efficient Indoor–Outdoor Image Classification

Abstract

Most traditional indoor---outdoor scene classification approaches utilize the simple statistics of the low-level features, such as colors, edges, and textures. However, the existence of colors similar to sky or grass often yields the false positives. To cope with this deficiency, we focus on the orientation of low-level features in this paper. First, the image is partitioned into five block regions, whose features are differently weighted in the following classification stage according to the block positions. The edge and color orientation histogram (ECOH) descriptors are defined to represent each block efficiently. Finally, all ECOH values are concatenated to generate the feature vector and fed into the SVM classifier for the indoor---outdoor scene classification. To justify the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method, the evaluation is conducted over 1200 images.