Nearest-Neighbors Based Weighted Method for the BOVW Applied to Image Classification

Abstract

This paper presents a new Nearest-Neighbors based weighted representation for images and weighted K-Nearest-Neighbors (WKNN) classifier to improve the precision of image classification using the Bag of Visual Words (BOVW) based models. Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) features are firstly extracted from images. Then, the K-means++ algorithm is adopted in place of the conventional K-means algorithm to generate a more effective visual dictionary. Furthermore, the histogram of visual words becomes more expressive by utilizing the proposed weighted vector quantization (WVQ). Finally, WKNN classifier is applied to enhance the properties of the classification task between images in which similar levels of background noise are present. Average precision and absolute change degree are calculated to assess the classification performance and the stability of K-means++ algorithm, respectively. Experimental results on three diverse datasets: Caltech-101, Caltech-256 and PASCAL VOC 2011 show that the proposed WVQ method and WKNN method further improve the performance of classification.