The ignorant led by the blind: A hybrid human-machine vision system for fine-grained categorization

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

We present a visual recognition system for fine-grained visual categorization. The system is composed of a human and a machine working together and combines the complementary strengths of computer vision algorithms and (non-expert) human users. The human users provide two heterogeneous forms of information object part clicks and answers to multiple choice questions. The machine intelligently selects the most informative question to pose to the user in order to identify the object class as quickly as possible. By leveraging computer vision and analyzing the user responses, the overall amount of human effort required, measured in seconds, is minimized. Our formalism shows how to incorporate many different types of computer vision algorithms into a human-in-the-loop framework, including standard multiclass methods, part-based methods, and localized multiclass and attribute methods. We explore our ideas by building a field guide for bird identification. The experimental results demonstrate the strength of combining ignorant humans with poor-sighted machines the hybrid system achieves quick and accurate bird identification on a dataset containing 200 bird species.

Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Journal of Computer Vision
Volume108
Issue number1-2
Pages (from-to)3-29
Number of pages27
ISSN0920-5691
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2014
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • Attributes, Birds, Crowdsourcing, Deformable part models, Fine-grained categorization, Human-in-the-loop, Information gain, Interactive, Object recognition, Parts, Pose mixture models

ID: 302046045