Deep Spatial Pyramid: The Devil is Once Again in the Details

In this paper we show that by carefully making good choices for various detailed but important factors in a visual recognition framework using deep learning features, one can achieve a simple, efficient, yet highly accurate image classification system. We first list 5 important factors, based on both existing researches and ideas proposed in this paper. These important detailed factors include: 1) ℓ2 matrix normalization is more effective than unnormalized or ℓ2 vector normalization, 2) the proposed natural deep spatial pyramid is very effective, and 3) a very small K in Fisher Vectors surprisingly achieves higher accuracy than normally used large K values. Along with other choices (convolutional activations and multiple scales), the proposed DSP framework is not only intuitive and efficient, but also achieves excellent classification accuracy on many benchmark datasets. For example, DSP's accuracy on SUN397 is 59.78%, significantly higher than previous state-of-the-art (53.86%).