Top-Down Color Attention for Object Recognition

Generally the bag-of-words based image representation follows a bottom-up paradigm. The subsequent stages of the process: feature detection, feature description, vocabulary construction and image representation are performed independent of the intentioned object classes to be detected. In such a framework, combining multiple cues such as shape and color often provides below-expected results. This paper presents a novel method for recognizing object categories when using multiple cues by separating the shape and color cue. Color is used to guide attention by means of a top-down category-specific attention map. The color attention map is then further deployed to modulate the shape features by taking more features from regions within an image that are likely to contain an object instance. This procedure leads to a category-specific image histogram representation for each category. Furthermore, we argue that the method combines the advantages of both early and late fusion....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost van de Weijer, Maria Vanrell
• Keywords: Color Attention, Computer Vision, ICCV 2009, Object Recognition