Unity in diversity: Discovering topics from words: Information theoretic co-clustering for visual categorization

This paper presents a novel approach to learning a codebook for visual categorization, that resolves the key issue of intra-category appearance variation found in complex real world datasets. The codebook of visual-topics (semantically equivalent descriptors) is made by grouping visual-words (syntactically equivalent descriptors) that are scattered in feature space. We analyze the joint distribution of images and visual-words using information theoretic co-clustering to discover visual-topics. Our approach is compared with the standard 'Bagof- Words' approach. The statistically significant performance improvement in all the datasets utilized (Pascal VOC 2006; VOC 2007; VOC 2010; Scene-15) establishes the efficacy of our approach