Object Classification with Joint Projection and Low-rank Dictionary Learning

For an object classification system, the most critical obstacles towards real-world applications are often caused by large intra-class variability, arising from different lightings, occlusion and corruption, in limited sample sets. Most methods in the literature would fail when the training samples are heavily occluded, corrupted or have significant illumination or viewpoint variations. Besides, most of the existing methods and especially deep learning-based methods, need large training sets to achieve a satisfactory recognition performance. Although using the pre-trained network on a generic large-scale dataset and fine-tune it to the small-sized target dataset is a widely used technique, this would not help when the content of base and target datasets are very different. To address these issues, we propose a joint projection and low-rank dictionary learning method using dual graph constraints (JP-LRDL). The proposed joint learning method would enable us to learn the features on top of which dictionaries can be better learned, from the data with large intra-class variability. Specifically, a structured class-specific dictionary is learned and the discrimination is further improved by imposing a graph constraint on the coding coefficients, that maximizes the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. We also enforce low-rank and structural incoherence constraints on sub-dictionaries to make them more compact and robust to variations and outliers and reduce the redundancy among them, respectively. To preserve the intrinsic structure of data and penalize unfavourable relationship among training samples simultaneously, we introduce a projection graph into the framework, which significantly enhances the discriminative ability of the projection matrix and makes the method robust to small-sized and high-dimensional datasets.