Sample selection for visual domain adaptation via sparse coding

•We aim at selecting relevant source samples using sparse coding theory.•L2,1L2,1 norm regularization is used to restrict the selection matrix.•We do the selection process in a low dimensional shared space.•We also exploit the target specific features.•A unified framework is presented to learn the selection matrix and projection matrices.

Visual domain adaptation has attracted much attention and has made great achievement in recent years. It deals with the problem of distribution divergence between source and target domains. Current methods mostly focus on transforming images from different domains into a common space to minimize the distribution divergence. However, there are many irrelevant source samples for target domain even after the transformation. In order to eliminate the irrelevant samples, we develop a sample selection algorithm using sparse coding theory. We do the sample selection in a common subspace of source and target data to find as many as relevant source samples. In the common subspace, data characteristics are preserved by using graph regularization. Therefore, we can select the most relevant samples for our target image classification task. Moreover, in order to build a discriminative classifier for the target domain, we use not only the common part of source and target domains learned in the common subspace but also the specific part of target domain. The algorithm can be extended to handle samples from multiple source domains. Experimental results show that our visual domain adaptation method on the image classification tasks can be very effective for the state-of-the-art datasets.