Generative Image Modeling Using Spatial LSTMs

Modeling the distribution of natural images is challenging, partly because of strong statistical dependencies which can extend over hundreds of pixels. Recurrent neural networks have been successful in capturing long-range dependencies in a number of problems but only recently have found their way into generative image models. We here introduce a recurrent image model based on multi-dimensional long short-term memory units which are particularly suited for image modeling due to their spatial structure. Our model scales to images of arbitrary size and its likelihood is computationally tractable. We find that it outperforms the state of the art in quantitative comparisons on several image datasets and produces promising results when used for texture synthesis and inpainting

In All Likelihood, Deep Belief Is Not Enough

Statistical models of natural stimuli provide an important tool for researchers in the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience. A canonical way to quantitatively assess and compare the performance of statistical models is given by the likelihood. One class of statistical models which has recently gained increasing popularity and has been applied to a variety of complex data are deep belief networks. Analyses of these models, however, have been typically limited to qualitative analyses based on samples due to the computationally intractable nature of the model likelihood. Motivated by these circumstances, the present article provides a consistent estimator for the likelihood that is both computationally tractable and simple to apply in practice. Using this estimator, a deep belief network which has been suggested for the modeling of natural image patches is quantitatively investigated and compared to other models of natural image patches. Contrary to earlier claims based on qualitative results, the results presented in this article provide evidence that the model under investigation is not a particularly good model for natural image

Enhancing hyperspectral image unmixing with spatial correlations

This paper describes a new algorithm for hyperspectral image unmixing. Most of the unmixing algorithms proposed in the literature do not take into account the possible spatial correlations between the pixels. In this work, a Bayesian model is introduced to exploit these correlations. The image to be unmixed is assumed to be partitioned into regions (or classes) where the statistical properties of the abundance coefficients are homogeneous. A Markov random field is then proposed to model the spatial dependency of the pixels within any class. Conditionally upon a given class, each pixel is modeled by using the classical linear mixing model with additive white Gaussian noise. This strategy is investigated the well known linear mixing model. For this model, the posterior distributions of the unknown parameters and hyperparameters allow ones to infer the parameters of interest. These parameters include the abundances for each pixel, the means and variances of the abundances for each class, as well as a classification map indicating the classes of all pixels in the image. To overcome the complexity of the posterior distribution of interest, we consider Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that generate samples distributed according to the posterior of interest. The generated samples are then used for parameter and hyperparameter estimation. The accuracy of the proposed algorithms is illustrated on synthetic and real data.Comment: Manuscript accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensin