Domain adaptive Fisher vector for visual recognition

In this paper, we consider Fisher vector in the context of domain adaptation, which has rarely been discussed by the existing domain adaptation methods. Particularly, in many real scenarios, the distributions of Fisher vectors of the training samples (i.e., source domain) and test samples (i.e., target domain) are considerably different, which may degrade the classification performance on the target domain by using the classifiers/regressors learnt based on the training samples from the source domain. To address the domain shift issue, we propose a Domain Adaptive Fisher Vector (DAFV) method, which learns a transformation matrix to select the domain invariant components of Fisher vectors and simultaneously solves a regression problem for visual recognition tasks based on the transformed features. Specifically, we employ a group lasso based regularizer on the transformation matrix to select the components of Fisher vectors, and use a regularizer based on the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) criterion to reduce the data distribution mismatch of transformed features between the source domain and the target domain. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DAFV method on two benchmark datasets.