Abstract

Recently, the coding of local features (e.g. SIFT) for image categorization tasks has been extensively studied. Incorporated within the Bag of Words (BoW) framework, these techniques optimize the pro- jection of local features into the visual codebook, leading to state-of-the- art performances in many benchmark datasets. In this work, we propose a novel visual codebook learning approach using the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) as our generative model. Our contribution is three-fold. Firstly, we steer the unsupervised RBM learning using a regularization scheme, which decomposes into a combined prior for the sparsity of each feature’s representation as well as the selectivity for each codeword. The codewords are then fine-tuned to be discriminative through the super- vised learning from top-down labels. Secondly, we evaluate the proposed method with the Caltech-101 and 15-Scenes datasets, either matching or outperforming state-of-the-art results. The codebooks are compact and inference is fast. Finally, we introduce an original method to visualize the codebooks and decipher what each visual codeword encodes.