Multi-attribute spaces: Calibration for attribute fusion and similarity search

• Main Authors: Scheirer, W. J., Kumar, N., Belhumeur, P. N., Boult, T. E.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Calibration; Context; Extraterrestrial measurements; Face; Hair; Hypercubes; Support vector machines
• ISSN: 1063-6919
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2012.6248021

Recent work has shown that visual attributes are a powerful approach for applications such as recognition, image description and retrieval. However, fusing multiple attribute scores - as required during multi-attribute queries or similarity searches - presents a significant challenge. Scores from different attribute classifiers cannot be combined in a simple way; the same score for different attributes can mean different things. In this work, we show how to construct normalized "multi-attribute spaces" from raw classifier outputs, using techniques based on the statistical Extreme Value Theory. Our method calibrates each raw score to a probability that the given attribute is present in the image. We describe how these probabilities can be fused in a simple way to perform more accurate multiattribute searches, as well as enable attribute-based similarity searches. A significant advantage of our approach is that the normalization is done after-the-fact, requiring neither modification to the attribute classification system nor ground truth attribute annotations. We demonstrate results on a large data set of nearly 2 million face images and show significant improvements over prior work. We also show that perceptual similarity of search results increases by using contextual attributes.