Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition

Domain adaptation is an active, emerging research area that attemptsto address the changes in data distribution across training and testingdatasets. With the availability of a multitude of image acquisition sensors,variations due to illumination, and viewpoint among others, computervision applications present a very natural test bed for evaluatingdomain adaptation methods. In this monograph, we provide a comprehensiveoverview of domain adaptation solutions for visual recognitionproblems. By starting with the problem description and illustrations,we discuss three adaptation scenarios namely, i unsupervised adaptationwhere the "source domain" training data is partially labeledand the "target domain" test data is unlabeled, ii semi-supervisedadaptation where the target domain also has partial labels, and iiimulti-domain heterogeneous adaptation which studies the previous twosettings with the source and/or target having more than one domain,and accounts for cases where the features used to represent the datain each domain are different. For all these topics we discuss existingadaptation techniques in the literature, which are motivated by theprinciples of max-margin discriminative learning, manifold learning,sparse coding, as well as low-rank representations. These techniqueshave shown improved performance on a variety of applications suchas object recognition, face recognition, activity analysis, concept classification,and person detection. We then conclude by analyzing thechallenges posed by the realm of "big visual data", in terms of thegeneralization ability of adaptation algorithms to unconstrained dataacquisition as well as issues related to their computational tractability,and draw parallels with the efforts from vision community on imagetransformation models, and invariant descriptors so as to facilitate improvedunderstanding of vision problems under uncertainty.