Zero-shot Recognition with Image Attributes Generation using Hierarchical Coupled Dictionary Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize images from unseen (novel) classes with the training images from seen classes. The attributes of each class is exploited as auxiliary semantic information. Recently most ZSL approaches focus on learning visual-semantic embeddings to transfer knowledge from the seen classes to the unseen classes. However, few works study whether the auxiliary semantic information in the class-level is extensive enough or not for the ZSL task. To tackle such problem, we propose a hierarchical coupled dictionary learning (HCDL) approach to hierarchically align the visual-semantic structures in both the class-level and the image-level. Firstly, the class-level coupled dictionary is trained to establish a basic connection between visual space and semantic space. Then, the image attributes are generated based on the basic connection. Finally, the fine-grained information can be embedded by training the image-level coupled dictionary. Zero-shot recognition is performed in multiple spaces by searching the nearest neighbor class of the unseen image. Experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.