Visual Classification of Furniture Styles

Furniture style describes the discriminative appearance characteristics of furniture. It plays an important role in real-world indoor decoration. In this article, we explore the furniture style features and study the problem of furniture style classification. Differing from traditional object classification, furniture style classification aims at classifying different furniture in terms of the “style” that describes its appearance (e.g., American style, Gothic style, Rococo style, etc.) rather than the “kind” that is more related to its functional structure (e.g., bed, desk, etc.). To pursue efficient furniture style features, we construct a novel dataset of furniture styles that contains 16 common style categories and implement three strategies with respect to two categories of classification, that is, handcrafted classification and learning-based classification. First, we follow the typical image classification pipeline to extract the handcrafted features and train the classifier by support vector machine. Then we use the convolutional neural network to extract learning-based features from training images. To obtain comprehensive furniture style features, we finally combine the handcrafted image classification pipeline and the learning-based network. We experimentally evaluate the performances of handcrafted features and learning-based features of each strategy, and the results show the superiority of learning-based features and also the comprehensiveness of handcrafted features.