This document provides an overview of bag-of-words models for computer vision tasks. It discusses the origins of bag-of-words models in texture recognition and document classification. It describes the basic steps of extracting local image features, learning a visual vocabulary through clustering, and representing images as histograms of visual word frequencies. The document outlines discriminative classification methods like nearest neighbors and support vector machines, as well as generative models like Naive Bayes and probabilistic latent semantic analysis. It provides details on various aspects of bag-of-words models, including feature extraction, vocabulary learning, image representations, and classification approaches.

1. Bag-of-Words models
Computer Vision
Lecture 8
Slides from: S. Lazebnik, A. Torralba, L. Fei-Fei, D. Lowe, C. Szurka

2. Bag-of-features models

3. Overview: Bag-of-features models
• Origins and motivation
• Image representation
• Discriminative methods
– Nearest-neighbor classification
– Support vector machines
• Generative methods
– Naïve Bayes
– Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
• Extensions: incorporating spatial information

4. Origin 1: Texture recognition
• Texture is characterized by the repetition of basic
elements or textons
• For stochastic textures, it is the identity of the textons,
not their spatial arrangement, that matters
Julesz, 1981; Cula & Dana, 2001; Leung & Malik 2001; Mori, Belongie & Malik, 2001; Schmid
2001; Varma & Zisserman, 2002, 2003; Lazebnik, Schmid & Ponce, 2003

5. Origin 1: Texture recognition
histogram
Universal texton dictionary
Julesz, 1981; Cula & Dana, 2001; Leung & Malik 2001; Mori, Belongie & Malik, 2001; Schmid
2001; Varma & Zisserman, 2002, 2003; Lazebnik, Schmid & Ponce, 2003

6. Origin 2: Bag-of-words models
• Orderless document representation: frequencies
of words from a dictionary Salton & McGill (1983)

7. Origin 2: Bag-of-words models
• Orderless document representation: frequencies
of words from a dictionary Salton & McGill (1983)
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

8. Origin 2: Bag-of-words models
• Orderless document representation: frequencies
of words from a dictionary Salton & McGill (1983)
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

9. Origin 2: Bag-of-words models
• Orderless document representation: frequencies
of words from a dictionary Salton & McGill (1983)
US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud
http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

10. Bags of features for image
classification
1. Extract features

11. Bags of features for image
classification
1. Extract features
2. Learn “visual vocabulary”

12. Bags of features for image
classification
1. Extract features
2. Learn “visual vocabulary”
3. Quantize features using visual vocabulary

13. Bags of features for image
classification
1. Extract features
2. Learn “visual vocabulary”
3. Quantize features using visual vocabulary
4. Represent images by frequencies of
“visual words”

14. 1. Feature extraction
• Regular grid
– Vogel & Schiele, 2003
– Fei-Fei & Perona, 2005

15. 1. Feature extraction
• Regular grid
– Vogel & Schiele, 2003
– Fei-Fei & Perona, 2005
• Interest point detector
– Csurka et al. 2004
– Fei-Fei & Perona, 2005
– Sivic et al. 2005

16. 1. Feature extraction
• Regular grid
– Vogel & Schiele, 2003
– Fei-Fei & Perona, 2005
• Interest point detector
– Csurka et al. 2004
– Fei-Fei & Perona, 2005
– Sivic et al. 2005
• Other methods
– Random sampling (Vidal-Naquet & Ullman, 2002)
– Segmentation-based patches (Barnard et al. 2003)

17. 1. Feature extraction
Compute SIFT
descriptor Normalize patch
[Lowe’99]
Detect patches
[Mikojaczyk and Schmid ’02]
[Mata, Chum, Urban & Pajdla, ’02]
[Sivic & Zisserman, ’03]
Slide credit: Josef Sivic

18. 1. Feature extraction
…

19. 2. Learning the visual vocabulary
…

20. 2. Learning the visual vocabulary
…
Clustering
Slide credit: Josef Sivic

21. 2. Learning the visual vocabulary
Visual vocabulary
…
Clustering
Slide credit: Josef Sivic

22. K-means clustering
• Want to minimize sum of squared
Euclidean distances between points xi and
their nearest cluster centers mk
D( X , M ) = ∑ ∑ ( xi − mk ) 2
cluster k point i in
cluster k
• Algorithm:
• Randomly initialize K cluster centers
• Iterate until convergence:
– Assign each data point to the nearest center
– Recompute each cluster center as the mean of
all points assigned to it

23. From clustering to vector quantization
• Clustering is a common method for learning a visual
vocabulary or codebook
– Unsupervised learning process
– Each cluster center produced by k-means becomes a
codevector
– Codebook can be learned on separate training set
– Provided the training set is sufficiently representative,
the codebook will be “universal”
• The codebook is used for quantizing features
– A vector quantizer takes a feature vector and maps it
to the index of the nearest codevector in a codebook
– Codebook = visual vocabulary
– Codevector = visual word

24. Example visual vocabulary
Fei-Fei et al. 2005

25. Image patch examples of visual words
Sivic et al. 2005

26. Visual vocabularies: Issues
• How to choose vocabulary size?
– Too small: visual words not representative of all
patches
– Too large: quantization artifacts, overfitting
• Generative or discriminative learning?
• Computational efficiency
– Vocabulary trees
(Nister & Stewenius, 2006)

27. 3. Image representation
frequency
…..
codewords

28. Image classification
• Given the bag-of-features representations of
images from different classes, how do we
learn a model for distinguishing them?

29. Discriminative and generative methods for
bags of features
Zebra
Non-zebra

30. Discriminative methods
• Learn a decision rule (classifier) assigning bag-
of-features representations of images to
different classes
Decision Zebra
boundary
Non-zebra

31. Classification
• Assign input vector to one of two or more
classes
• Any decision rule divides input space into
decision regions separated by decision
boundaries

32. Nearest Neighbor Classifier
• Assign label of nearest training data point
to each test data point
from Duda et al.
Voronoi partitioning of feature space
for two-category 2D and 3D data Source: D. Lowe

33. K-Nearest Neighbors
• For a new point, find the k closest points from training
data
• Labels of the k points “vote” to classify
• Works well provided there is lots of data and the distance
function is good
k=5
Source: D. Lowe

34. Functions for comparing histograms
• L1 distance N
D(h1 , h2 ) = ∑ | h1 (i ) − h2 (i ) |
i =1
D(h1 , h2 ) = ∑
N
( h1 (i) − h2 (i) ) 2
• χ2 distance
i =1 h1 (i ) + h2 (i )

35. Linear classifiers
• Find linear function (hyperplane) to separate
positive and negative examples
x i positive : xi ⋅ w + b ≥ 0
x i negative : xi ⋅ w + b < 0
Which hyperplane
is best?
Slide: S. Lazebnik

36. Support vector machines
• Find hyperplane that maximizes the margin
between the positive and negative examples
C. Burges, A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition, Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, 1998

37. Support vector machines
• Find hyperplane that maximizes the margin
between the positive and negative examples
x i positive ( yi = 1) : xi ⋅ w + b ≥ 1
x i negative ( yi = −1) : x i ⋅ w + b ≤ −1
For support vectors, x i ⋅ w + b = ±1
Distance between point | xi ⋅ w + b |
and hyperplane: || w ||
Therefore, the margin is 2 / ||w||
Support vectors Margin
C. Burges, A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition, Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, 1998

38. Finding the maximum margin
hyperplane
1. Maximize margin 2/||w||
2. Correctly classify all training data:
x i positive ( yi = 1) : xi ⋅ w + b ≥ 1
x i negative ( yi = −1) : x i ⋅ w + b ≤ −1
C. Burges, A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition, Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, 1998

39. Nonlinear SVMs
• Datasets that are linearly separable work out great:
0 x
• But what if the dataset is just too hard?
0 x
• We can map it to a higher-dimensional space:
x2
0 x Slide credit: Andrew Moore

40. Nonlinear SVMs
• General idea: the original input space can
always be mapped to some higher-
dimensional feature space where the training
set is separable:
Φ: x → φ(x)
Slide credit: Andrew Moore

41. Nonlinear SVMs
• The kernel trick: instead of explicitly
computing the lifting transformation φ(x),
define a kernel function K such that
K(xi, xj) = φ(xi ) · φ(xj)
• (to be valid, the kernel function must satisfy
Mercer’s condition)
• This gives a nonlinear decision boundary in
the original feature space:
∑ α y K ( x , x) + b
i
i i i
C. Burges, A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition, Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, 1998

42. Kernels for bags of features
• Histogram intersection kernel:
N
I (h1 , h2 ) = ∑ min(h1 (i ), h2 (i ))
i =1
• Generalized Gaussian kernel:
 1 2
K (h1 , h2 ) = exp − D(h1 , h2 ) 
 A 
• D can be Euclidean distance, χ2 distance
J. Zhang, M. Marszalek, S. Lazebnik, and C. Schmid, Local Features and Kernels for Classifcation
of Texture and Object Categories: A Comprehensive Study, IJCV 2007

43. What about multi-class SVMs?
• Unfortunately, there is no “definitive” multi-class SVM
formulation
• In practice, we have to obtain a multi-class SVM by
combining multiple two-class SVMs
• One vs. others
– Traning: learn an SVM for each class vs. the others
– Testing: apply each SVM to test example and assign to it the
class of the SVM that returns the highest decision value
• One vs. one
– Training: learn an SVM for each pair of classes
– Testing: each learned SVM “votes” for a class to assign to the
test example
Slide: S. Lazebnik

44. SVMs: Pros and cons
• Pros
– Many publicly available SVM packages:
http://www.kernel-machines.org/software
– Kernel-based framework is very powerful, flexible
– SVMs work very well in practice, even with very
small training sample sizes
• Cons
– No “direct” multi-class SVM, must combine two-
class SVMs
– Computation, memory
• During training time, must compute matrix of kernel
values for every pair of examples
• Learning can take a very long time for large-scale
problems
Slide: S. Lazebnik

45. Summary: Discriminative methods
• Nearest-neighbor and k-nearest-neighbor classifiers
– L1 distance, χ2 distance, quadratic distance,
– Support vector machines
– Linear classifiers
– Margin maximization
– The kernel trick
– Kernel functions: histogram intersection, generalized
Gaussian, pyramid match
– Multi-class
• Of course, there are many other classifiers out there
– Neural networks, boosting, decision trees, …

46. Generative learning methods for bags of features
• Model the probability of a bag of features
given a class

47. Generative methods
• We will cover two models, both inspired by
text document analysis:
– Naïve Bayes
– Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis

48. The Naïve Bayes model
• Assume that each feature is conditionally
independent given the class
N
p ( f1 ,  , f N | c) = ∏ p ( f i | c)
i =1
fi: ith feature in the image
N: number of features in the image
Csurka et al. 2004

49. The Naïve Bayes model
• Assume that each feature is conditionally
independent given the class
N M
p( f1 ,  , f N | c) = ∏ p ( f i | c) = ∏ p ( w j | c)
n(w j )
i =1 j =1
fi: ith feature in the image
N: number of features in the image
wj: jth visual word in the vocabulary
M: size of visual vocabulary
n(wj): number of features of type wj in the image
Csurka et al. 2004

50. The Naïve Bayes model
• Assume that each feature is conditionally
independent given the class
N M
p( f1 ,  , f N | c) = ∏ p ( f i | c) = ∏ p ( w j | c)
n(w j )
i =1 j =1
No. of features of type wj in training images of class c
p(wj | c) =
Total no. of features in training images of class c
Csurka et al. 2004

51. The Naïve Bayes model
• Maximum A Posteriori decision:
M
c* = arg max c p (c)∏ p ( w j | c)
n(w j )
j =1
M
= arg max c log p (c) + ∑ n( w j ) log p ( w j | c)
j =1
(you should compute the log of the likelihood
instead of the likelihood itself in order to avoid
underflow)
Csurka et al. 2004

52. The Naïve Bayes model
• “Graphical model”:
c w
N
Csurka et al. 2004

53. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
= p1 + p2 + p3
Image zebra grass tree
“visual topics”
T. Hofmann, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, UAI 1999

54. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
• Unsupervised technique
• Two-level generative model: a document is a
mixture of topics, and each topic has its own
characteristic word distribution
d z w
document topic word
P(z|d) P(w|z)
T. Hofmann, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, UAI 1999

55. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
• Unsupervised technique
• Two-level generative model: a document is a
mixture of topics, and each topic has its own
characteristic word distribution
d z w
K
p ( wi | d j ) = ∑ p ( wi | z k ) p ( z k | d j )
k =1
T. Hofmann, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, UAI 1999

56. The pLSA model
K
p ( wi | d j ) = ∑ p ( wi | z k ) p ( z k | d j )
k =1
Probability of word i Probability of Probability of
in document j word i given topic k given
(known) topic k document j
(unknown) (unknown)

57. The pLSA model
K
p ( wi | d j ) = ∑ p ( wi | z k ) p ( z k | d j )
k =1
documents topics documents
words
words
topics
p(zk|dj)
p(wi|dj)
= p(wi|zk)
Observed codeword Codeword distributions Class distributions
distributions per topic (class) per image
(M×N) (M×K) (K×N)

58. Learning pLSA parameters
Maximize likelihood of data:
Observed counts of
word i in document j
M … number of codewords
N … number of images
Slide credit: Josef Sivic

59. Inference
• Finding the most likely topic (class) for an image:
∗
z = arg max p ( z | d )
z

60. Inference
• Finding the most likely topic (class) for an image:
∗
z = arg max p ( z | d )
z
• Finding the most likely topic (class) for a visual
word in a given image:
z ∗ = arg max p ( z | w, d )
z

61. Topic discovery in images
J. Sivic, B. Russell, A. Efros, A. Zisserman, B. Freeman, Discovering Objects and their Location
in Images, ICCV 2005

62. Application of pLSA: Action recognition
Space-time interest points
Juan Carlos Niebles, Hongcheng Wang and Li Fei-Fei, Unsupervised Learning of Human Action
Categories Using Spatial-Temporal Words, IJCV 2008.

63. Application of pLSA: Action recognition
Juan Carlos Niebles, Hongcheng Wang and Li Fei-Fei, Unsupervised Learning of Human Action
Categories Using Spatial-Temporal Words, IJCV 2008.

64. pLSA model
K
p ( wi | d j ) = ∑ p ( wi | z k ) p ( z k | d j )
k =1
Probability of word i Probability of Probability of
in video j word i given topic k given
(known) topic k video j
(unknown) (unknown)
– wi = spatial-temporal word
– dj = video
– n(wi, dj) = co-occurrence table
(# of occurrences of word wi in video dj)
– z = topic, corresponding to an action

65. Action recognition example

66. Multiple Actions

67. Multiple Actions

68. Summary: Generative models
• Naïve Bayes
– Unigram models in document analysis
– Assumes conditional independence of words given
class
– Parameter estimation: frequency counting
• Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis
– Unsupervised technique
– Each document is a mixture of topics (image is a
mixture of classes)
– Can be thought of as matrix decomposition