Multi-Label Image Classification with Weak Correlation Prior

Image classification is vital and basic in many data analysis domains. Since real-world images generally contain multiple diverse semantic labels, it amounts to a typical multi-label classification problem. Traditional multi-label image classification relies on a large amount of training data with plenty of labels, which requires a lot of human and financial costs. By contrast, one can easily obtain a correlation matrix of concerned categories in current scene based on the historical image data in other application scenarios. How to perform image classification with only label correlation priors, without specific and costly annotated labels, is an important but rarely studied problem. In this paper, we propose a model to classify images with this kind of weak correlation prior. We use label correlation to recapitulate the sample similarity, employ the prior information to decompose the projection matrix when regressing the label indication matrix, and introduce the ℓ2,1 norm to select features for each image. Finally, experimental results on several image datasets demonstrate that the proposed model has distinct advantages over current state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.