A discriminative and sparse topic model for image classification and annotation

• The label information is enforced in the generation of visual and annotation terms.
• The zero-mean Laplace distribution is added to a topic generative process.
• The sparse image representation is helpful to learn a training model.
• A series of experiments on four data sets demonstrate the performance of DSTM.

Image classification is to assign a category of an image and image annotation is to describe individual components of an image by using some annotation terms. These two learning tasks are strongly related. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a new discriminative and sparse topic model (DSTM) for image classification and annotation by combining visual, annotation and label information from a set of training images. The essential features of DSTM different from existing approaches are that (i) the label information is enforced in the generation of both visual words and annotation terms such that each generative latent topic corresponds to a category; (ii) the zero-mean Laplace distribution is employed to give a sparse representation of images in visual words and annotation terms such that relevant words and terms are associated with latent topics. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides the discrimination ability in classification and annotation, and its performance is better than the other testing methods (sLDA-ann, abc-corr-LDA, SupDocNADE, SAGE and MedSTC) for LabelMe, UIUC, NUS-WIDE and PascalVOC07 images.