# Multi-Class Leveraged $k$-NN for Image Classification

Abstract : The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classification rule is still an essential tool for computer vision applications, such as scene recognition. However, k-NN still features some major drawbacks, which mainly reside in the uniform voting among the nearest prototypes in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a new method that is able to learn the "relevance" of prototypes, thus classifying test data using a weighted k-NN rule. In particular, our algorithm, called Multi-class Leveraged k-nearest neighbor (MLNN), learns the prototype weights in a boosting framework, by minimizing a surrogate exponential risk over training data. We propose two main contributions for improving computational speed and accuracy. On the one hand, we implement learning in an inherently multiclass way, thus providing significant computation time reduction over one-versus-all approaches. Furthermore, the leveraging weights enable effective data selection, thus reducing the cost of k-NN search at classification time. On the other hand, we propose a kernel generalization of our approach to take into account real-valued similarities between data in the feature space, thus enabling more accurate estimation of the local class density. We tested MLNN on three datasets of natural images. Results show that MLNN significantly outperforms classic k-NN and weighted k-NN voting. Furthermore, using an adaptive Gaussian kernel provides significant performance improvement. Finally, the best results are obtained when using MLNN with an appropriate learned metric distance.
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Conference papers

Cited literature [19 references]

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00664606
Contributor : Michel Barlaud <>
Submitted on : Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - 10:41:06 AM
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• HAL Id : hal-00664606, version 1

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Paolo Piro, Richard Nock, Frank Nielsen, Michel Barlaud. Multi-Class Leveraged $k$-NN for Image Classification. Proceedings of the 10th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, ACCV 2010, November 8-12, 2010, Queenstown, New Zealand, 2010, Queenstown, New Zealand. ⟨hal-00664606⟩

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