Evaluating effectiveness of Latent Dirichlet Allocation model for scene classification

Scene classification from images is a challenging problem in computer vision due to its significant variability of scale, illumination, and view. Recently, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model has grown popular in computer vision field, especially in scene labeling and classification. However, the effectiveness of the LDA model for the scene classification has not yet been addressed thoroughly. Especially, there is little experimental evaluation on the model's performance for different types of features. Fusion of multiple types of features is usually necessary in the scene classification due to the complexity of scene images. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the LDA model in scene classification by using 7 types of features (i.e. uniform grid based interest points, Harris corner based interest points, scale invariant feature transform (SIFT), texture, shape, color, and location) and their various combinations. Furthermore, we compare the performance of the LDA model with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. All experiments are performed on the UIUC Sport Scene database. The experiments demonstrate that the performance of the LDA model 1) is significantly lower than the SVM classifier for the scene classification over different types of features; and 2) decreases by fusing multiple features while improvement shown in SVM classifier.