What is Image Classification? Main Challenges in Image Clssification.

Image classification is process of assigning labels to images according to their types (classes).

If we have images of following categories: cats and dogs

So when we provide image of given category to image classification system, the system will assign label
to images according to the category.

For example if we provide the following image to the “image classification system” .The system should
assign the label “dog” to the image.

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Challenges in image classification

1. Intra-Class Variation
2. Scale Variation
3. View-Point Variation
4. Occlusion
5. Illumination
6. Background Clutter

1. Intra-Class Variation

Intra-Class Variation is the variation between the images of same class. The example of intra-
class variation is having chairs of multiple type in our dataset. Chair can be “office chair”,
“comfy chair”, “dining table chair”, “deco chairs” etc.

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2. Scale Variation

This problem is very common in image classification. Scale variation is actually having image
of same object with multiple size.

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3. View-Point Variation

we have viewpoint variation, where an object can be oriented/rotated in multiple

dimensions with respect to how the object is photographed and captured. No matter the angle in
which we capture the image of cup, it’s still a cup.

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4. Occlusion

There are a lot of objects which we want to classify in images can not be view completely.
There large part is hidden behind other objects.

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Explain the image
5. Illumination

Our image classification should also be able to handle changes in Illumination.

Take a look at the coffee cup captured in standard and low lighting. The image on the left was
photographed with standard overhead lighting while the image on the right was captured with very
little lighting. We are still examining the same cup but based on the lighting conditions, the cup looks
dramatically different (nice how the vertical cardboard seam of the cup is clearly visible in the low
lighting conditions, but not the standard lighting).

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6. Background Clutter

It means that there are a lot of objects in the image and for observer it is very tough to find the
particular object. These images are very “noisy”.

But we are only interested in one particular object in the image; however, due to all the “noise”, it’s not
easy to pick out particular object.

For human it is very difficult task, so imagine how hard it is for a computer with no semantic
understanding of the image.

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