In solving complex visual learning tasks, adopting multiple descriptors to more precisely characterize the data has been a feasible way for improving performance. These representations are typically high dimensional and assume diverse forms. Thus finding a way to transform them into a unified space of lower dimension generally facilitates the underlying tasks, such as object recognition or clustering. We describe an approach that incorporates multiple kernel learning with dimensionality reduction (MKL-DR). While the proposed framework is flexible in simultaneously tackling data in various feature representations, the formulation itself is general in that it is established upon graph embedding.

In solving complex visual learning tasks, adopting multiple descriptors to more precisely characterize the data has been a feasible way for improving performance. These representations are typically high dimensional and assume diverse forms. Thus finding a way to transform them into a unified space of lower dimension generally facilitates the underlying tasks, such as object recognition or clustering. We describe an approach that incorporates multiple kernel learning with dimensionality reduction (MKL-DR). While the proposed framework is flexible in simultaneously tackling data in various feature representations, the formulation itself is general in that it is established upon graph embedding. It follows that any dimensionality reduction techniques explainable by graph embedding can be generalized by our method to consider data in multiple feature representations.

Dictionary learning (DL) is an effective feature learning technique, and has led to interesting results in many classification tasks. Recently, by combining DL with multiple kernel learning (which is a crucial and effective technique for combining different feature representation information), a few multi-kernel DL methods have been presented to solve the multiple feature representations based classification problem. However, how to improve the representation capability and discriminability of multi-kernel dictionary has not been well studied. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-kernel DL approach, named multi-kernel low-rank dictionary pair learning (MKLDPL). Specifically, MKLDPL jointly learns a kernel synthesis dictionary and a kernel analysis dictionary by exploiting the class label information. The learned synthesis and analysis dictionaries work together to implement the coding and reconstruction of samples in the kernel space. To enhance the discriminability of the learned multi-kernel dictionaries, MKLDPL imposes the low-rank regularization on the analysis dictionary, which can make samples from the same class have similar representations. We apply MKLDPL for multiple features based image classification task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.