Deep Epitomic Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep convolutional neural networks have recently proven extremely competitive in challenging image recognition tasks. This paper proposes the epitomic convolution as a new building block for deep neural networks. An epitomic convolution layer replaces a pair of consecutive convolution and max-pooling layers found in standard deep convolutional neural networks. The main version of the proposed model uses mini-epitomes in place of filters and computes responses invariant to small translations by epitomic search instead of max-pooling over image positions. The topographic version of the proposed model uses large epitomes to learn filter maps organized in translational topographies. We show that error back-propagation can successfully learn multiple epitomic layers in a supervised fashion. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed in image classification tasks on standard benchmarks. Our experiments on Imagenet indicate improved recognition performance compared to standard convolutional neural networks of similar architecture. Our models pre-trained on Imagenet perform excellently on Caltech-101. We also obtain competitive image classification results on the small-image MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.Comment: 9 page

Reading Scene Text in Deep Convolutional Sequences

We develop a Deep-Text Recurrent Network (DTRN) that regards scene text reading as a sequence labelling problem. We leverage recent advances of deep convolutional neural networks to generate an ordered high-level sequence from a whole word image, avoiding the difficult character segmentation problem. Then a deep recurrent model, building on long short-term memory (LSTM), is developed to robustly recognize the generated CNN sequences, departing from most existing approaches recognising each character independently. Our model has a number of appealing properties in comparison to existing scene text recognition methods: (i) It can recognise highly ambiguous words by leveraging meaningful context information, allowing it to work reliably without either pre- or post-processing; (ii) the deep CNN feature is robust to various image distortions; (iii) it retains the explicit order information in word image, which is essential to discriminate word strings; (iv) the model does not depend on pre-defined dictionary, and it can process unknown words and arbitrary strings. Codes for the DTRN will be available.Comment: To appear in the 13th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), 201

Deformable Part Models are Convolutional Neural Networks

Deformable part models (DPMs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two widely used tools for visual recognition. They are typically viewed as distinct approaches: DPMs are graphical models (Markov random fields), while CNNs are "black-box" non-linear classifiers. In this paper, we show that a DPM can be formulated as a CNN, thus providing a novel synthesis of the two ideas. Our construction involves unrolling the DPM inference algorithm and mapping each step to an equivalent (and at times novel) CNN layer. From this perspective, it becomes natural to replace the standard image features used in DPM with a learned feature extractor. We call the resulting model DeepPyramid DPM and experimentally validate it on PASCAL VOC. DeepPyramid DPM significantly outperforms DPMs based on histograms of oriented gradients features (HOG) and slightly outperforms a comparable version of the recently introduced R-CNN detection system, while running an order of magnitude faster