Scene classification in compressed and constrained domain

Holistic representations of natural scenes are an effective and powerful source of information for semantic classification and analysis of images. Despite the technological hardware and software advances, consumer single-sensor imaging devices technology are quite far from the ability of recognising scenes and/or to exploit the visual content during (or after) acquisition time. The frequency domain has been successfully exploited to holistically encode the content of natural scenes in order to obtain a robust representation for scene classification. The authors exploit a holistic representation of the scene in the discrete cosine transform domain fully compatible with the JPEG format. The advised representation is coupled with a logistic classifier to perform classification of the scene at superordinate level of description (e.g. natural against artificial), or to discriminate between multiple classes of scenes usually acquired by a consumer imaging device (e.g. portrait, landscape and document). The proposed method is able to work in constrained domain. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results closely match state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy outperforming in terms of computational resources.