Supervised descriptor learning for multi-output regression

Descriptor learning has recently drawn increasing attention in computer vision, Existing algorithms are mainly developed for classification rather than for regression which however has recently emerged as a powerful tool to solve a broad range of problems, e.g., head pose estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised descriptor learning (SDL) algorithm to establish a discriminative and compact feature representation for multi-output regression. By formulating as generalized low-rank approximations of matrices with a supervised manifold regularization (SMR), the SDL removes irrelevant and redundant information from raw features by transforming into a low-dimensional space under the supervision of multivariate targets. The obtained discriminative while compact descriptor largely reduces the variability and ambiguity in multi-output regression, and therefore enables more accurate and efficient multivariate estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SDL algorithm on a representative multi-output regression task: head pose estimation using the benchmark Pointing'04 dataset. Experimental results show that the SDL can achieve high pose estimation accuracy and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by an error reduction up to 27.5%. The proposed SDL algorithm provides a general descriptor learning framework in a supervised way for multi-output regression which can largely boost the performance of existing multi-output regression tasks.