Using Text to Improve Classification of Man-Made Objects

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2022-01-01

Department

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Program

Computer Science

Citation of Original Publication

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Abstract

People identify man-made objects by their visual appearance and the text on them e.g., does a bottle say water or shampoo? We use text as an important visual cue to help distinguish between similar looking objects. This theses explores a novel joint model of visual appearance and textual cues for image classification.We perform this in three functions - (a) Isolating an object in an input image; (b) Extracting text from the image; (c) Training a joint vision/text model. We simplify the task by extracting text separately and presenting it to the model in machine readable format. Such a joint model has utility in many real world challenges where language is interpreted through a sensory perception like vision or sound. The aim of the research is to understand whether visual percepts, when understood in the context of extracted language, will provide a better classification of image objects than using only pure vision to perform image classification. In conclusion, we show that joint classifier models can successfully make use of text present in images to classify objects, provided that the extracted text from images is of high quality and we have the number of images proportional to the number of classification classes.