Using node relationships for hierarchical classification

Hierarchical classification is a computational efficient approach for large-scale image classification. The main challenging issue of this approach is to deal with error propagation. Irrelevant branching decision made at a parent node cannot be corrected at its child nodes in traversing the tree for classification. This paper presents a novel approach to reduce branching error at a node by taking its relative relationship into account. Given a node on the tree, we model each candidate branch by considering classification response of its child nodes, grandchild nodes and their differences with siblings. A maximum margin classifier is then applied to select the most discriminating candidate. Our proposed approach outperforms related approaches on Caltech-256, SUN-397 and ILSVRC2010-1K.