In this chapter, the authors present a new method to improve the performance of current bag-of-words based image classification process. After feature extraction, they introduce a pairwise image matching scheme to select the discriminative features. Only the label information from the training-sets is used to update the feature weights via an iterative matching processing. The selected features correspond to the foreground content of the images, and thus highlight the high level category knowledge of images. Visual words are constructed on these selected features. This novel method could be used as a refinement step for current image classification and retrieval process. The authors prove the efficiency of their method in three tasks: supervised image classification, semi-supervised image classification, and image retrieval.
