Sample-Dependent Feature Selection for Faster Document Image Categorization

In document image classification, some classes of documents can be easily identified using pixel-level features, whereas some distinctions can only be made using semantics, which usually involves a full automatic text transcription. To be as much efficient as possible, the classification system should be able to avoid extracting high-level and time consuming features when they are not necessary to classify with confidence. We introduce here this issue of sample-dependent feature selection, which has not been addressed before as far as we know. We propose a method to tackle this problem, that can be generalized to any classifier that provides a confidence score along with its prediction. Empirical results using AdaBoost on three mail classification problems show that our approach allows to significantly improve classification efficiency (up to 40% CPU time off) without significant loss of accuracy in comparison to the baseline.