Multiple Instance Classification in the Image Domain

Ilaria Bartolini, Pietro Pascarella, Marco Patella

Abstract: Multiple instance classification (MIC) is a kind of supervised learning, where data are represented as bags and each bag contains many instances. Training bags are given a label and the system tries to learn how to label unknown bags, without necessarily learning how to label individually each of their instances. In particular, we apply concepts drawn from MIC to the realm of content-based image retrieval, where images are described as bags of visual local descriptors. We introduce several classifiers, according to the different MIC paradigms, and evaluate them experimentally on a real-world dataset, comparing their accuracy and efficiency.