Online Discriminative Dictionary Learning for Image Classification Based on Block-Coordinate Descent Method

Previous researches have demonstrated that the framework of dictionary learning with sparse coding, in which signals are decomposed as linear combinations of a few atoms of a learned dictionary, is well adept to reconstruction issues. This framework has also been used for discrimination tasks such as image classification. To achieve better performances of classification, experts develop several methods to learn a discriminative dictionary in a supervised manner. However, another issue is that when the data become extremely large in scale, these methods will be no longer effective as they are all batch-oriented approaches. For this reason, we propose a novel online algorithm for discriminative dictionary learning, dubbed ODDL in this paper. First, we introduce a linear classifier into the conventional dictionary learning formulation and derive a discriminative dictionary learning problem. Then, we exploit an online algorithm to solve the derived problem. Unlike the most existing approaches which update dictionary and classifier alternately via iteratively solving sub-problems, our approach directly explores them jointly. Meanwhile, it can largely shorten the runtime for training and is also particularly suitable for large-scale classification issues. To evaluate the performance of the proposed ODDL approach in image recognition, we conduct some experiments on three well-known benchmarks, and the experimental results demonstrate ODDL is fairly promising for image classification tasks.