Spatially constrained sparse coding scheme for natural scene categorization

• Similar image features will be encoded by similar codewords.
• Low dimensionality feature, but higher classification performance.
• Visualize salient pooling regions.
• Obtains state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks.

Coding and pooling, the major two sequential procedures in sparse coding based scene categorization systems, have drawn much attention in recent years. Yet improvements have been made for coding or pooling separately, this paper proposes a spatially constrained scheme for sparse coding on both steps. Specifically, we employ the m-nearest neighbors of a local feature in the image space to improve the consistency of coding. The benefit is that similar image features will be encoded with similar codewords, which reduced the stochasticity of a conventional coding strategy. We also show that the Viola–Jones algorithm, which is well-known in face detection, can be tailored to learning receptive fields, embedding the spatially constrained information on the pooling step. Extensive experiments on the UIUC sport event, 15 natural scenes and the Caltech 101 database suggests that scene categorization performance of several popular algorithms can be ubiquitously improved by incorporating the proposed two spatially constrained sparse coding scheme.