  The bag-of-features (BoF) model for image classification has been thoroughly
studied over the last decade. Different from the widely used BoF methods which
modeled images with a pre-trained codebook, the alternative codebook free image
modeling method, which we call Codebookless Model (CLM), attracted little
attention. In this paper, we present an effective CLM that represents an image
with a single Gaussian for classification. By embedding Gaussian manifold into
a vector space, we show that the simple incorporation of our CLM into a linear
classifier achieves very competitive accuracy compared with state-of-the-art
BoF methods (e.g., Fisher Vector). Since our CLM lies in a high dimensional
Riemannian manifold, we further propose a joint learning method of low-rank
transformation with support vector machine (SVM) classifier on the Gaussian
manifold, in order to reduce computational and storage cost. To study and
alleviate the side effect of background clutter on our CLM, we also present a
simple yet effective partial background removal method based on saliency
detection. Experiments are extensively conducted on eight widely used databases
to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our CLM method.
