Bag of Visual Words Method based on PLSA and Chi-Square Model for Object Category

Abstract

The problem of visual words’ synonymy and ambiguity always exist in the conventional bag of visual words (BoVW) model based object category methods. Besides, the noisy visual words, so-called “visual stop-words” will degrade the semantic resolution of visual dictionary. In view of this, a novel bag of visual words method based on PLSA and chi-square model for object category is proposed. Firstly, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) is used to analyze the semantic co-occurrence probability of visual words, infer the latent semantic topics in images, and get the latent topic distributions induced by the words. Secondly, the KL divergence is adopt to measure the semantic distance between visual words, which can get semantically related homoionym. Then, adaptive soft-assignment strategy is combined to realize the soft mapping between SIFT features and some homoionym. Finally, the chi-square model is introduced to eliminate the “visual stop-words” and reconstruct the visual vocabulary histograms. Moreover, SVM (Support Vector Machine) is applied to accomplish object classification. Experimental results indicated that the synonymy and ambiguity problems of visual words can be overcome effectively. The distinguish ability of visual semantic resolution as well as the object classification performance are substantially boosted compared with the traditional methods.