Knowledge Fused Recognition: Fusing Hierarchical Knowledge for Image Recognition through Quantitative Relativity Modeling and Deep Metric Learning

Image recognition is an essential baseline for deep metric learning. Hierarchical knowledge about image classes depicts inter-class similarities or dissimilarities. Effective fusion of hierarchical knowledge about image classes to enhance image recognition remains a challenging topic to advance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep metric learning based method to effectively fuse hierarchical prior knowledge about image classes and enhance image recognition performances in an end-to-end supervised regression manner. Existing deep metric learning incorporated image classification mainly exploits qualitative relativity between image classes, i.e., whether sampled images are from the same class. A new triplet loss function term that exploits quantitative relativity and aligns distances in model latent space with those in knowledge space is also proposed and incorporated in the proposed dual-modality fusion method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method enhanced image recognition performances and outperformed baseline and existing methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Mini-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1K datasets.