Effects of Degradations on Deep Neural Network Architectures

Recently, image classification methods based on capsules (groups of neurons) and a novel dynamic routing protocol are proposed. The methods show promising performances than the state-of-the-art CNN-based models in some of the existing datasets. However, the behavior of capsule-based models and CNN-based models are largely unknown in presence of noise. So it is important to study the performance of these models under various noises. In this paper, we demonstrate the effect of image degradations on deep neural network architectures for image classification task. We select six widely used CNN architectures to analyse their performances for image classification task on datasets of various distortions. Our work has three main contributions: 1) we observe the effects of degradations on different CNN models; 2) accordingly, we propose a network setup that can enhance the robustness of any CNN architecture for certain degradations, and 3) we propose a new capsule network that achieves high recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the performance of CapsuleNet (CapsNet) and other state-of-the-art CNN architectures under different types of image degradations. Also, our datasets and source code are available publicly to the researchers.Comment: Journa

How Image Degradations Affect Deep CNN-based Face Recognition?

Face recognition approaches that are based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been dominating the field. The performance improvements they have provided in the so called in-the-wild datasets are significant, however, their performance under image quality degradations have not been assessed, yet. This is particularly important, since in real-world face recognition applications, images may contain various kinds of degradations due to motion blur, noise, compression artifacts, color distortions, and occlusion. In this work, we have addressed this problem and analyzed the influence of these image degradations on the performance of deep CNN-based face recognition approaches using the standard LFW closed-set identification protocol. We have evaluated three popular deep CNN models, namely, the AlexNet, VGG-Face, and GoogLeNet. Results have indicated that blur, noise, and occlusion cause a significant decrease in performance, while deep CNN models are found to be robust to distortions, such as color distortions and change in color balance.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Deep Learning for Single Image Super-Resolution: A Brief Review

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is a notoriously challenging ill-posed problem, which aims to obtain a high-resolution (HR) output from one of its low-resolution (LR) versions. To solve the SISR problem, recently powerful deep learning algorithms have been employed and achieved the state-of-the-art performance. In this survey, we review representative deep learning-based SISR methods, and group them into two categories according to their major contributions to two essential aspects of SISR: the exploration of efficient neural network architectures for SISR, and the development of effective optimization objectives for deep SISR learning. For each category, a baseline is firstly established and several critical limitations of the baseline are summarized. Then representative works on overcoming these limitations are presented based on their original contents as well as our critical understandings and analyses, and relevant comparisons are conducted from a variety of perspectives. Finally we conclude this review with some vital current challenges and future trends in SISR leveraging deep learning algorithms.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM

Learning to Rank Question-Answer Pairs using Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder with Latent Topic Clustering

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural architecture for ranking candidate answers, that adapts a hierarchical recurrent neural network and a latent topic clustering module. With our proposed model, a text is encoded to a vector representation from an word-level to a chunk-level to effectively capture the entire meaning. In particular, by adapting the hierarchical structure, our model shows very small performance degradations in longer text comprehension while other state-of-the-art recurrent neural network models suffer from it. Additionally, the latent topic clustering module extracts semantic information from target samples. This clustering module is useful for any text related tasks by allowing each data sample to find its nearest topic cluster, thus helping the neural network model analyze the entire data. We evaluate our models on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus and consumer electronic domain question answering dataset, which is related to Samsung products. The proposed model shows state-of-the-art results for ranking question-answer pairs.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted as a conference paper at NAACL 201