  Combining information from various image features has become a standard
technique in concept recognition tasks. However, the optimal way of fusing the
resulting kernel functions is usually unknown in practical applications.
Multiple kernel learning (MKL) techniques allow to determine an optimal linear
combination of such similarity matrices. Classical approaches to MKL promote
sparse mixtures. Unfortunately, so-called 1-norm MKL variants are often
observed to be outperformed by an unweighted sum kernel. The contribution of
this paper is twofold: We apply a recently developed non-sparse MKL variant to
state-of-the-art concept recognition tasks within computer vision. We provide
insights on benefits and limits of non-sparse MKL and compare it against its
direct competitors, the sum kernel SVM and the sparse MKL. We report empirical
results for the PASCAL VOC 2009 Classification and ImageCLEF2010 Photo
Annotation challenge data sets. About to be submitted to PLoS ONE.
