Effective naive Bayes nearest neighbor based image classification on GPU

Non-parametric classifier, Naive Bayes nearest neighbor, is designed with no training phase, and its performance outperforms many well-trained learning-based image classifiers. Unfortunately, despite its high accuracy, it suffers from great computational pressure from distance computations in space of local feature. This paper explores accelerating strategies from perspectives of both algorithm design and software development. Our approach integrates space decomposition capability of Product quantization (PQ) and parallel accelerating capability of underlying computational platform, Graphics processing unit (GPU). PQ is exploited to compress the indexed local features and prune the search space. GPU is used to ease most of computational pressure by processing the tasks in parallel. To achieve good parallel efficiency, a new sequential classification process is first designed and decomposed into independent components with high parallelism. Effective parallelization techniques are then presented to make use of computational resources. Parallel heap array is built to accelerate the process of feature quantization. Distance table lookup is built to speed up the process of feature search. Comparative experiments on UIUC-Sport dataset demonstrate that our integrated solution outperforms other implementations significantly on Core-quad Intel Core i7 950 CPU and GPU of NVIDIA Geforce GTX460. Scalability experiment on 80 million tiny images database shows that our approach still performs well when large-scale image database is explored.