  We attack the problem of learning concepts automatically from noisy web image
search results. Going beyond low level attributes, such as colour and texture,
we explore weakly-labelled datasets for the learning of higher level concepts,
such as scene categories. The idea is based on discovering common
characteristics shared among subsets of images by posing a method that is able
to organise the data while eliminating irrelevant instances. We propose a novel
clustering and outlier detection method, namely Rectifying Self Organizing Maps
(RSOM). Given an image collection returned for a concept query, RSOM provides
clusters pruned from outliers. Each cluster is used to train a model
representing a different characteristics of the concept. The proposed method
outperforms the state-of-the-art studies on the task of learning low-level
concepts, and it is competitive in learning higher level concepts as well. It
is capable to work at large scale with no supervision through exploiting the
available sources.
