Aiming to improve recognition rate, we propose a
novel flower recognition system that automatically expands the
training data from large-scale unlabeled image pools without
human intervention. Existing flower recognition approaches often
learn classifiers based on a small labeled dataset. However,
it is difficult to build a generalizable model (e.g., for realworld
environment) with only a handful of labeled training
examples, and it is labor-intensive for manually annotating largescale
images. To resolve these difficulties, we propose a novel
framework that automatically expands the training data to
include visually diverse examples from large-scale web images
with minimal supervision. Inspired by co-training methods, we
investigate two conceptually independent modalities (i.e., shape
and color) that provide complementary information to learn
our discriminative classifiers. Experimental results show that the
augmented training set can significantly improve the recognition
accuracy (from 65.8% to 75.4%) with a very small initially
labeled training set. We also conduct a set of sensitivity tests
to analyze different learning strategies (i.e., co-training and selftraining)
and show that co-training is more efficient in our multiview
flower dataset.
Index Terms-semi-supervised learning, flower recognition,
self-training, co-training