Rediscover flowers structurally

Existing methods for flower classification are usually focused on segmentation of the foreground, followed by extraction of features. After extracting the features from the foreground, global pooling is performed for final classification. Although this pipeline can be applied to many recognition tasks, however, these approaches have not explored structural cues of the flowers due to the large variation in their appearances. In this paper, we argue that structural cues are essential for flower recognition. We present a novel approach that explores structural cues to extract features. The proposed method encodes the structure of flowers into the final feature vectors for classification by operating on salient regions, which is robust to appearance variations. In our framework, we first segment the flower accurately by refining the existing segmentation method, and then we generate local features using our approach. We combine our local feature with global-pooled features for classification. Evaluations on the Oxford Flower dataset shows that by introducing the structural cues and locally pooling of some off-the-shelf features, our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts which employ specific designed features and metric learning.