Recent image classification algorithms, by learning deep features from large-scale datasets, have achieved significantly better results comparing to the classic feature-based approaches. However, there are still various challenges of image classifications in practice, such as classifying noisy image or image-set queries and training deep image classification models over the limited-scale dataset. Instead of applying generic deep features, the model-based approaches can be more effective and data-efficient for robust image and image-set classification tasks, as various image priors are exploited for modeling the inter- and intra-set data variations while preventing over-fitting. In this work, we propose a novel Joint Statistical and Spatial Sparse representation, dubbed \textit{J3S}, to model the image or image-set data for classification, by reconciling both their local patch structures and global Gaussian distribution mapped into Riemannian manifold. To the best of our knowledge, no work to date utilized both global statistics and local patch structures jointly via joint sparse representation. We propose to solve the joint sparse coding problem based on the J3S model, by coupling the local and global image representations using joint sparsity. The learned J3S models are used for robust image and image-set classification. Experiments show that the proposed J3S-based image classification scheme outperforms the popular or state-of-the-art competing methods over FMD, UIUC, ETH-80 and YTC databases.
The remarkable success of deep learning in recent years has prompted applications in medical image classification and diagnosis tasks. While classification models have demonstrated robustness in classifying simpler datasets like MNIST or natural images such as ImageNet, this resilience is not consistently observed in complex medical image datasets where data is more scarce and lacks diversity. Moreover, previous findings on natural image datasets have indicated a potential trade-off between data likelihood and classification accuracy. In this study, we explore the use of score-based generative models as classifiers for medical images, specifically mammographic images. Our findings suggest that our proposed generative classifier model not only achieves superior classification results on CBIS-DDSM, INbreast and Vin-Dr Mammo datasets, but also introduces a novel approach to image classification in a broader context. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sushmitasarker/sgc_for_medical_image_classification
Recent vision-language models outperform vision-only models on many image classification tasks. However, because of the absence of paired text/image descriptions, it remains difficult to fine-tune these models for fine-grained image classification. In this work, we propose a method, GIST, for generating image-specific fine-grained text descriptions from image-only datasets, and show that these text descriptions can be used to improve classification. Key parts of our method include 1. prompting a pretrained large language model with domain-specific prompts to generate diverse fine-grained text descriptions for each class and 2. using a pretrained vision-language model to match each image to label-preserving text descriptions that capture relevant visual features in the image. We demonstrate the utility of GIST by fine-tuning vision-language models on the image-and-generated-text pairs to learn an aligned vision-language representation space for improved classification. We evaluate our learned representation space in full-shot and few-shot scenarios across four diverse fine-grained classification datasets, each from a different domain. Our method achieves an average improvement of $4.1\%$ in accuracy over CLIP linear probes and an average of $1.1\%$ improvement in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art image-text classification method on the full-shot datasets. Our method achieves similar improvements across few-shot regimes. Code is available at https://github.com/emu1729/GIST.
Image classifiers for domain-specific tasks like Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition (SAR ATR) and chest X-ray classification often rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These networks, while powerful, experience high latency due to the number of operations they perform, which can be problematic in real-time applications. Many image classification models are designed to work with both RGB and grayscale datasets, but classifiers that operate solely on grayscale images are less common. Grayscale image classification has critical applications in fields such as medical imaging and SAR ATR. In response, we present a novel grayscale image classification approach using a vectorized view of images. By leveraging the lightweight nature of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), we treat images as vectors, simplifying the problem to grayscale image classification. Our approach incorporates a single graph convolutional layer in a batch-wise manner, enhancing accuracy and reducing performance variance. Additionally, we develop a customized accelerator on FPGA for our model, incorporating several optimizations to improve performance. Experimental results on benchmark grayscale image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving significantly lower latency (up to $16\times$ less on MSTAR) and competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models for SAR ATR and medical image classification.
Image classification requires the generation of features capable of detecting image patterns informative of group identity. The objective of this study was to classify images from the public CIFAR-10 image dataset by leveraging combinations of disparate image feature sources from both manual and deep learning approaches. Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and pixel intensities successfully inform classification (53% and 59% classification accuracy, respectively), yet there is much room for improvement. VGG16 with ImageNet trained weights and a CIFAR-10 optimized model (CIFAR-VGG) further improve upon image classification (60% and 93.43% accuracy, respectively). We further improved classification by utilizing transfer learning to re-establish optimal network weights for VGG16 (TL-VGG) and Inception ResNet v2 (TL-Inception) resulting in significant performance increases (85% and 90.74%, respectively), yet fail to surpass CIFAR-VGG. We hypothesized that if each generated feature set obtained some unique insight into the classification problem, then combining these features would result in greater classification accuracy, surpassing that of CIFAR-VGG. Upon selection of the top 1000 principal components from TL-VGG, TL-Inception, HOG, pixel intensities, and CIFAR-VGG, we achieved testing accuracy of 94.6%, lending support to our hypothesis.
We propose an end-to-end image compression and analysis model with Transformers, targeting to the cloud-based image classification application. Instead of placing an existing Transformer-based image classification model directly after an image codec, we aim to redesign the Vision Transformer (ViT) model to perform image classification from the compressed features and facilitate image compression with the long-term information from the Transformer. Specifically, we first replace the patchify stem (i.e., image splitting and embedding) of the ViT model with a lightweight image encoder modelled by a convolutional neural network. The compressed features generated by the image encoder are injected convolutional inductive bias and are fed to the Transformer for image classification bypassing image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a feature aggregation module to fuse the compressed features with the selected intermediate features of the Transformer, and feed the aggregated features to a deconvolutional neural network for image reconstruction. The aggregated features can obtain the long-term information from the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer and improve the compression performance. The rate-distortion-accuracy optimization problem is finally solved by a two-step training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both the image compression and the classification tasks.
Image classification is an important task in various machine learning applications. In recent years, a number of classification methods based on quantum machine learning and different quantum image encoding techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we study the effect of three different quantum image encoding approaches on the performance of a convolution-inspired hybrid quantum-classical image classification algorithm called quanvolutional neural network (QNN). We furthermore examine the effect of variational - i.e. trainable - quantum circuits on the classification results. Our experiments indicate that some image encodings are better suited for variational circuits. However, our experiments show as well that there is not one best image encoding, but that the choice of the encoding depends on the specific constraints of the application.
The development of deep convolutional neural network architecture is critical to the improvement of image classification task performance. Many image classification studies use deep convolutional neural network and focus on modifying the network structure to improve image classification performance. Conversely, our study focuses on loss function design. Cross-entropy Loss (CEL) has been widely used for training deep convolutional neural network for the task of multi-class classification. Although CEL has been successfully implemented in several image classification tasks, it only focuses on the posterior probability of the correct class. For this reason, a negative log likelihood ratio loss (NLLR) was proposed to better differentiate between the correct class and the competing incorrect ones. However, during the training of the deep convolutional neural network, the value of NLLR is not always positive or negative, which severely affects the convergence of NLLR. Our proposed competing ratio loss (CRL) calculates the posterior probability ratio between the correct class and the competing incorrect classes to further enlarge the probability difference between the correct and incorrect classes. We added hyperparameters to CRL, thereby ensuring its value to be positive and that the update size of backpropagation is suitable for the CRL's fast convergence. To demonstrate the performance of CRL, we conducted experiments on general image classification tasks (CIFAR10/100, SVHN, ImageNet), the fine-grained image classification tasks (CUB200-2011 and Stanford Car), and the challenging face age estimation task (using Adience). Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed loss function on different deep convolutional neural network architectures and different image classification tasks.
Visual Language Models such as CLIP excel in image recognition due to extensive image-text pre-training. However, applying the CLIP inference in zero-shot classification, particularly for medical image diagnosis, faces challenges due to: 1) the inadequacy of representing image classes solely with single category names; 2) the modal gap between the visual and text spaces generated by CLIP encoders. Despite attempts to enrich disease descriptions with large language models, the lack of class-specific knowledge often leads to poor performance. In addition, empirical evidence suggests that existing proxy learning methods for zero-shot image classification on natural image datasets exhibit instability when applied to medical datasets. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Knowledge Proxy Learning (KPL) to mine knowledge from CLIP. KPL is designed to leverage CLIP's multimodal understandings for medical image classification through Text Proxy Optimization and Multimodal Proxy Learning. Specifically, KPL retrieves image-relevant knowledge descriptions from the constructed knowledge-enhanced base to enrich semantic text proxies. It then harnesses input images and these descriptions, encoded via CLIP, to stably generate multimodal proxies that boost the zero-shot classification performance. Extensive experiments conducted on both medical and natural image datasets demonstrate that KPL enables effective zero-shot image classification, outperforming all baselines. These findings highlight the great potential in this paradigm of mining knowledge from CLIP for medical image classification and broader areas.
Breast cancer has the highest mortality among cancers in women. Computer-aided pathology to analyze microscopic histopathology images for diagnosis with an increasing number of breast cancer patients can bring the cost and delays of diagnosis down. Deep learning in histopathology has attracted attention over the last decade of achieving state-of-the-art performance in classification and localization tasks. The convolutional neural network, a deep learning framework, provides remarkable results in tissue images analysis, but lacks in providing interpretation and reasoning behind the decisions. We aim to provide a better interpretation of classification results by providing localization on microscopic histopathology images. We frame the image classification problem as weakly supervised multiple instance learning problem where an image is collection of patches i.e. instances. Attention-based multiple instance learning (A-MIL) learns attention on the patches from the image to localize the malignant and normal regions in an image and use them to classify the image. We present classification and localization results on two publicly available BreakHIS and BACH dataset. The classification and visualization results are compared with other recent techniques. The proposed method achieves better localization results without compromising classification accuracy.
We consider image classification with estimated depth. This problem falls into the domain of transfer learning, since we are using a model trained on a set of depth images to generate depth maps (additional features) for use in another classification problem using another disjoint set of images. It's challenging as no direct depth information is provided. Though depth estimation has been well studied, none have attempted to aid image classification with estimated depth. Therefore, we present a way of transferring domain knowledge on depth estimation to a separate image classification task over a disjoint set of train, and test data. We build a RGBD dataset based on RGB dataset and do image classification on it. Then evaluation the performance of neural networks on the RGBD dataset compared to the RGB dataset. From our experiments, the benefit is significant with shallow and deep networks. It improves ResNet-20 by 0.55% and ResNet-56 by 0.53%. Our code and dataset are available publicly.
Deep neural networks can be effective means to automatically classify aerial images but is easy to overfit to the training data. It is critical for trained neural networks to be robust to variations that exist between training and test environments. To address the overfitting problem in aerial image classification, we consider the neural network as successive transformations of an input image into embedded feature representations and ultimately into a semantic class label, and train neural networks to optimize image representations in the embedded space in addition to optimizing the final classification score. We demonstrate that networks trained with this dual embedding and classification loss outperform networks with classification loss only. %We also study placing the embedding loss on different network layers. We also find that moving the embedding loss from commonly-used feature space to the classifier space, which is the space just before softmax nonlinearization, leads to the best classification performance for aerial images. Visualizations of the network's embedded representations reveal that the embedding loss encourages greater separation between target class clusters for both training and testing partitions of two aerial image classification benchmark datasets, MSTAR and AID. Our code is publicly available on GitHub.
Few-shot learning (FSL) is one of the significant and hard problems in the field of image classification. However, in contrast to the rapid development of the visible light dataset, the progress in SAR target image classification is much slower. The lack of unified benchmark is a key reason for this phenomenon, which may be severely overlooked by the current literature. The researchers of SAR target image classification always report their new results on their own datasets and experimental setup. It leads to inefficiency in result comparison and impedes the further progress of this area. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel few-shot SAR image classification benchmark (FewSAR) to address this issue. FewSAR consists of an open-source Python code library of 15 classic methods in three categories for few-shot SAR image classification. It provides an accessible and customizable testbed for different few-shot SAR image classification task. To further understanding the performance of different few-shot methods, we establish evaluation protocols and conduct extensive experiments within the benchmark. By analyzing the quantitative results and runtime under the same setting, we observe that the accuracy of metric learning methods can achieve the best results. Meta-learning methods and fine-tuning methods perform poorly on few-shot SAR images, which is primarily due to the bias of existing datasets. We believe that FewSAR will open up a new avenue for future research and development, on real-world challenges at the intersection of SAR image classification and few-shot deep learning. We will provide our code for the proposed FewSAR at https://github.com/solarlee/FewSAR.
Image reconstruction is likely the most predominant auxiliary task for image classification, but we would like to think twice about this convention. In this paper, we investigated "approximating the Fourier Transform of the input image" as a potential alternative, in the hope that it may further boost the performances on the primary task or introduce novel constraints not well covered by image reconstruction. We experimented with five popular classification architectures on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and the empirical results indicated that our proposed auxiliary task generally improves the classification accuracy. More notably, the results showed that in certain cases our proposed auxiliary task may enhance the classifiers' resistance to adversarial attacks generated using the fast gradient sign method.
This paper provides a simple solution for reliably solving image classification tasks tied to spatial locations of salient objects in the scene. Unlike conventional image classification approaches that are designed to be invariant to translations of objects in the scene, we focus on tasks where the output classes vary with respect to where an object of interest is situated within an image. To handle this variant of the image classification task, we propose augmenting the standard cross-entropy (classification) loss with a domain dependent Forced Spatial Attention (FSA) loss, which in essence compels the network to attend to specific regions in the image associated with the desired output class. To demonstrate the utility of this loss function, we consider the task of driver foot activity classification - where each activity is strongly correlated with where the driver's foot is in the scene. Training with our proposed loss function results in significantly improved accuracies, better generalization, and robustness against noise, while obviating the need for very large datasets.
Image classification is one of the most fundamental capabilities of machine vision intelligence. In this work, we revisit the image classification task using visually-grounded language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V and LLaVA. We find that existing proprietary and public VLMs, despite often using CLIP as a vision encoder and having many more parameters, significantly underperform CLIP on standard image classification benchmarks like ImageNet. To understand the reason, we explore several hypotheses concerning the inference algorithms, training objectives, and data processing in VLMs. Our analysis reveals that the primary cause is data-related: critical information for image classification is encoded in the VLM's latent space but can only be effectively decoded with enough training data. Specifically, there is a strong correlation between the frequency of class exposure during VLM training and instruction-tuning and the VLM's performance in those classes; when trained with sufficient data, VLMs can match the accuracy of state-of-the-art classification models. Based on these findings, we enhance a VLM by integrating classification-focused datasets into its training, and demonstrate that the enhanced classification performance of the VLM transfers to its general capabilities, resulting in an improvement of 11.8% on the newly collected ImageWikiQA dataset.
Camera trap imagery has become an invaluable asset in contemporary wildlife surveillance, enabling researchers to observe and investigate the behaviors of wild animals. While existing methods rely solely on image data for classification, this may not suffice in cases of suboptimal animal angles, lighting, or image quality. This study introduces a novel approach that enhances wild animal classification by combining specific metadata (temperature, location, time, etc) with image data. Using a dataset focused on the Norwegian climate, our models show an accuracy increase from 98.4% to 98.9% compared to existing methods. Notably, our approach also achieves high accuracy with metadata-only classification, highlighting its potential to reduce reliance on image quality. This work paves the way for integrated systems that advance wildlife classification technology.
Zero-shot learning models achieve remarkable results on image classification for samples from classes that were not seen during training. However, such models must be trained from scratch with specialised methods: therefore, access to a training dataset is required when the need for zero-shot classification arises. In this paper, we aim to equip pre-trained models with zero-shot classification capabilities without the use of image data. We achieve this with our proposed Image-free Classifier Injection with Semantics (ICIS) that injects classifiers for new, unseen classes into pre-trained classification models in a post-hoc fashion without relying on image data. Instead, the existing classifier weights and simple class-wise descriptors, such as class names or attributes, are used. ICIS has two encoder-decoder networks that learn to reconstruct classifier weights from descriptors (and vice versa), exploiting (cross-)reconstruction and cosine losses to regularise the decoding process. Notably, ICIS can be cheaply trained and applied directly on top of pre-trained classification models. Experiments on benchmark ZSL datasets show that ICIS produces unseen classifier weights that achieve strong (generalised) zero-shot classification performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ImageFreeZSL .
Remote sensing image classification forms the foundation of various understanding tasks, serving a crucial function in remote sensing image interpretation. The recent advancements of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have markedly enhanced classification accuracy. Nonetheless, remote sensing scene classification remains a significant challenge, especially given the complexity and diversity of remote sensing scenarios and the variability of spatiotemporal resolutions. The capacity for whole-image understanding can provide more precise semantic cues for scene discrimination. In this paper, we introduce RSMamba, a novel architecture for remote sensing image classification. RSMamba is based on the State Space Model (SSM) and incorporates an efficient, hardware-aware design known as the Mamba. It integrates the advantages of both a global receptive field and linear modeling complexity. To overcome the limitation of the vanilla Mamba, which can only model causal sequences and is not adaptable to two-dimensional image data, we propose a dynamic multi-path activation mechanism to augment Mamba's capacity to model non-causal data. Notably, RSMamba maintains the inherent modeling mechanism of the vanilla Mamba, yet exhibits superior performance across multiple remote sensing image classification datasets. This indicates that RSMamba holds significant potential to function as the backbone of future visual foundation models. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/KyanChen/RSMamba}.
We study utilizing auxiliary information in training data to improve the trustworthiness of machine learning models. Specifically, in the context of image classification, we propose to optimize a training objective that incorporates bounding box information, which is available in many image classification datasets. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability compared with baselines.