Interactively building a discriminative vocabulary of nameable attributes

Human-nameable visual attributes offer many advantages when used as mid-level features for object recognition, but existing techniques to gather relevant attributes can be inefficient (costing substantial effort or expertise) and/or insufficient (descriptive properties need not be discriminative). We introduce an approach to define a vocabulary of attributes that is both human understandable and discriminative. The system takes object/scene-labeled images as input, and returns as output a set of attributes elicited from human annotators that distinguish the categories of interest. To ensure a compact vocabulary and efficient use of annotators' effort, we 1) show how to actively augment the vocabulary such that new attributes resolve inter-class confusions, and 2) propose a novel “nameability” manifold that prioritizes candidate attributes by their likelihood of being associated with a nameable property. We demonstrate the approach with multiple datasets, and show its clear advantages over baselines that lack a nameability model or rely on a list of expert-provided attributes.