A Semi-supervised Active Learning Framework for Image Classification

In this paper, a novel image classification method, incorporating active learning and semi-supervised learning (SSL), is proposed. In this method, two classifiers are needed where one is trained by labeled data and some unlabeled data, while the other one is trained only by labeled data. Specifically, in each round, two classifiers iterate to select useful examples in contention for user query. Then we compute the label changing rate for every unlabeled example in each classifier. Those examples in which the label changing rate is zero and the label in the two classifiers is the same are selected to add into the training data of the first classifier. Our experimental results show that our method significantly reduced the need of labeled examples, while at the same time reducing classification error compared with widely used image classification algorithms.