A classification-oriented dictionary learning model: Explicitly learning the particularity and commonality across categories

•We propose a discriminative dictionary learning method for image classification.•Our method learns class-specific feature sub-dictionaries and a common pattern pool.•The class-specific dictionary captures the most discriminative features of the class.•The common pattern pool complements the representation of images over the dictionary.•We provide the explanation of our model and the comparisons with other methods.

Empirically, we find that despite the most exclusively discriminative features owned by one specific object category, the various classes of objects usually share some common patterns, which do not contribute to the discrimination of them. Concentrating on this observation and motivated by the success of dictionary learning (DL) framework, in this paper, we propose to explicitly learn a class-specific dictionary (called particularity) for each category that captures the most discriminative features of this category, and simultaneously learn a common pattern pool (called commonality), whose atoms are shared by all the categories and only contribute to representation of the data rather than discrimination. In this way, the particularity differentiates the categories while the commonality provides the essential reconstruction for the objects. Thus, we can simply adopt a reconstruction-based scheme for classification. By reviewing the existing DL-based classification methods, we can see that our approach simultaneously learns a classification-oriented dictionary and drives the sparse coefficients as discriminative as possible. In this way, the proposed method will achieve better classification performance. To evaluate our method, we extensively conduct experiments both on synthetic data and real-world benchmarks in comparison with the existing DL-based classification algorithms, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.