Deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve excellent performance on standard classification tasks. However, under image quality distortions such as blur and noise, classification accuracy becomes poor. In this work, we compare the performance of DNNs with human subjects on distorted images. We show that, although DNNs perform better than or on par with humans on good quality images, DNN performance is still much lower than human performance on distorted images. We additionally find that there is little correlation in errors between DNNs and human subjects. This could be an indication that the internal representation of images are different between DNNs and the human visual system. These comparisons with human performance could be used to guide future development of more robust DNNs.
It is not surprising that deep networks trained on clean images perform poorly on distorted images. DNNs are optimized using the statistics of a collection of images, and when the statistics in the testing stage are very different, the model cannot generalize well. Most efforts to add robustness involve fine-tuning DNNs on distorted images. Vasiljevic al @cite_2 show that fine-tuning yields improvements for blurred images. Similarly, Zhou al @cite_9 show that this approach also works for images distorted with noise. However, Dodge and Karam @cite_8 show that models fine-tuned on one type of distortion do not easily generalize to other types of distortions. They show how a gating network can be used to determine the distortion type and level of an input, and pass the data to an appropriately trained network. Finally, the dirty pixel approach @cite_17 shows that fine-tuning with an additional pre-processing module can yield a DNN more robust to blur and noise.
@cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_17 @cite_2
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In recent years, the widespread use of deep neural networks (DNNs) has facilitated great improvements in performance for computer vision tasks like image classification and object recognition. In most realistic computer vision applications, an input image undergoes some form of image distortion such as blur and additive noise during image acquisition or transmission. Deep networks trained on pristine images perform poorly when tested on such distortions. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of image distortions like Gaussian blur and additive noise on the activations of pre-trained convolutional filters. We propose a metric to identify the most noise susceptible convolutional filters and rank them in order of the highest gain in classification accuracy upon correction. In our proposed approach called DeepCorrect , we apply small stacks of convolutional layers with residual connections at the output of these ranked filters and train them to correct the worst distortion affected filter activations, while leaving the rest of the pre-trained filter outputs in the network unchanged. Performance results show that applying DeepCorrect models for common vision tasks like image classification (ImageNet), object recognition (Caltech-101, Caltech-256), and scene classification (SUN-397), significantly improves the robustness of DNNs against distorted images and outperforms other alternative approaches. We compare the robustness of humans and current convolutional deep neural networks (DNNs) on object recognition under twelve different types of image degradations. First, using three well known DNNs (ResNet-152, VGG-19, GoogLeNet) we find the human visual system to be more robust to nearly all of the tested image manipulations, and we observe progressively diverging classification error-patterns between humans and DNNs when the signal gets weaker. Secondly, we show that DNNs trained directly on distorted images consistently surpass human performance on the exact distortion types they were trained on, yet they display extremely poor generalisation abilities when tested on other distortion types. For example, training on salt-and-pepper noise does not imply robustness on uniform white noise and vice versa. Thus, changes in the noise distribution between training and testing constitutes a crucial challenge to deep learning vision systems that can be systematically addressed in a lifelong machine learning approach. Our new dataset consisting of 83K carefully measured human psychophysical trials provide a useful reference for lifelong robustness against image degradations set by the human visual system. We compare the robustness of humans and current convolutional deep neural networks (DNNs) on object recognition under twelve different types of image degradations. First, using three well known DNNs (ResNet-152, VGG-19, GoogLeNet) we find the human visual system to be more robust to nearly all of the tested image manipulations, and we observe progressively diverging classification error-patterns between humans and DNNs when the signal gets weaker. Secondly, we show that DNNs trained directly on distorted images consistently surpass human performance on the exact distortion types they were trained on, yet they display extremely poor generalisation abilities when tested on other distortion types. For example, training on salt-and-pepper noise does not imply robustness on uniform white noise and vice versa. Thus, changes in the noise distribution between training and testing constitutes a crucial challenge to deep learning vision systems that can be systematically addressed in a lifelong machine learning approach. Our new dataset consisting of 83K carefully measured human psychophysical trials provide a useful reference for lifelong robustness against image degradations set by the human visual system. We study deep neural networks for classification of images with quality distortions. We first show that networks fine-tuned on distorted data greatly outperform the original networks when tested on distorted data. However, fine-tuned networks perform poorly on quality distortions that they have not been trained for. We propose a mixture of experts ensemble method that is robust to different types of distortions. The "experts" in our model are trained on a particular type of distortion. The output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The gating network is trained to predict optimal weights for a particular distortion type and level. During testing, the network is blind to the distortion level and type, yet can still assign appropriate weights to the expert models. We additionally investigate weight sharing methods for the mixture model and show that improved performance can be achieved with a large reduction in the number of unique network parameters. Deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve excellent performance on standard classification tasks. However, under image quality distortions such as blur and noise, classification accuracy becomes poor. In this work, we compare the performance of DNNs with human subjects on distorted images. We show that, although DNNs perform better than or on par with humans on good quality images, DNN performance is still much lower than human performance on distorted images. We additionally find that there is little correlation in errors between DNNs and human subjects. This could be an indication that the internal representation of images are different between DNNs and the human visual system. These comparisons with human performance could be used to guide future development of more robust DNNs. Automatically detecting illustrations is needed for the target system.Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have been successful in computer vision tasks.DCNN with fine-tuning outperformed the other models including handcrafted features. Systems for aggregating illustrations require a function for automatically distinguishing illustrations from photographs as they crawl the network to collect images. A previous attempt to implement this functionality by designing basic features that were deemed useful for classification achieved an accuracy of only about 58 . On the other hand, deep neural networks had been successful in computer vision tasks, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) had performed good at extracting such useful image features automatically. We evaluated alternative methods to implement this classification functionality with focus on deep neural networks. As the result of experiments, the method that fine-tuned deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) acquired 96.8 accuracy, outperforming the other models including the custom CNN models that were trained from scratch. We conclude that DCNN with fine-tuning is the best method for implementing a function for automatically distinguishing illustrations from photographs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of pattern-recognition tasks, most notably visual classification problems. Given that DNNs are now able to classify objects in images with near-human-level performance, questions naturally arise as to what differences remain between computer and human vision. A recent study [30] revealed that changing an image (e.g. of a lion) in a way imperceptible to humans can cause a DNN to label the image as something else entirely (e.g. mislabeling a lion a library). Here we show a related result: it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the-art DNNs believe to be recognizable objects with 99.99 confidence (e.g. labeling with certainty that white noise static is a lion). Specifically, we take convolutional neural networks trained to perform well on either the ImageNet or MNIST datasets and then find images with evolutionary algorithms or gradient ascent that DNNs label with high confidence as belonging to each dataset class. It is possible to produce images totally unrecognizable to human eyes that DNNs believe with near certainty are familiar objects, which we call “fooling images” (more generally, fooling examples). Our results shed light on interesting differences between human vision and current DNNs, and raise questions about the generality of DNN computer vision. Optimizing deep neural networks (DNNs) often suffers from the ill-conditioned problem. We observe that the scaling-based weight space symmetry property in rectified nonlinear network will cause this negative effect. Therefore, we propose to constrain the incoming weights of each neuron to be unit-norm, which is formulated as an optimization problem over Oblique manifold. A simple yet efficient method referred to as projection based weight normalization (PBWN) is also developed to solve this problem. PBWN executes standard gradient updates, followed by projecting the updated weight back to Oblique manifold. This proposed method has the property of regularization and collaborates well with the commonly used batch normalization technique. We conduct comprehensive experiments on several widely-used image datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN and ImageNet for supervised learning over the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, such as Inception, VGG and residual networks. The results show that our method is able to improve the performance of DNNs with different architectures consistently. We also apply our method to Ladder network for semi-supervised learning on permutation invariant MNIST dataset, and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods: we obtain test errors as 2.52 , 1.06 , and 0.91 with only 20, 50, and 100 labeled samples, respectively. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown unprecedented success in various computer vision applications such as image classification and object detection. However, it is still a common annoyance during the training phase, that one has to prepare at least thousands of labeled images to fine-tune a network to a specific domain. Recent study ( 2015) shows that a DNN has strong dependency towards the training dataset, and the learned features cannot be easily transferred to a different but relevant task without fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful remedy, called Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) to increase the generalization ability of a DNN. By modulating the statistics in all Batch Normalization layers across the network, our approach achieves deep adaptation effect for domain adaptation tasks. In contrary to other deep learning domain adaptation methods, our method does not require additional components, and is parameter-free. It archives state-of-the-art performance despite its surprising simplicity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is complementary with other existing methods. Combining AdaBN with existing domain adaptation treatments may further improve model performance. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown unprecedented success in various computer vision applications such as image classification and object detection. However, it is still a common annoyance during the training phase, that one has to prepare at least thousands of labeled images to fine-tune a network to a specific domain. Recent study shows that a DNN has strong dependency towards the training dataset, and the learned features cannot be easily transferred to a different but relevant task without fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful remedy, called Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) to increase the generalization ability of a DNN. By modulating the statistics from the source domain to the target domain in all Batch Normalization layers across the network, our approach achieves deep adaptation effect for domain adaptation tasks. In contrary to other deep learning domain adaptation methods, our method does not require additional components, and is parameter-free. It archives state-of-the-art performance despite its surprising simplicity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is complementary with other existing methods. Combining AdaBN with existing domain adaptation treatments may further improve model performance. Image blur and image noise are common distortions during image acquisition. In this paper, we systematically study the effect of image distortions on the deep neural network (DNN) image classifiers. First, we examine the DNN classifier performance under four types of distortions. Second, we propose two approaches to alleviate the effect of image distortion: re-training and fine-tuning with noisy images. Our results suggest that, under certain conditions, fine-tuning with noisy images can alleviate much effect due to distorted inputs, and is more practical than re-training. Abstract Deep neural networks (DNN) have shown unprecedented success in various computer vision applications such as image classification and object detection. However, it is still a common annoyance during the training phase, that one has to prepare at least thousands of labeled images to fine-tune a network to a specific domain. Recent study (, 2015) shows that a DNN has strong dependency towards the training dataset, and the learned features cannot be easily transferred to a different but relevant task without fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful remedy, called Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) to increase the generalization ability of a DNN. By modulating the statistics from the source domain to the target domain in all Batch Normalization layers across the network, our approach achieves deep adaptation effect for domain adaptation tasks. In contrary to other deep learning domain adaptation methods, our method does not require additional components, and is parameter-free. It archives state-of-the-art performance despite its surprising simplicity. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method is complementary with other existing methods. Combining AdaBN with existing domain adaptation treatments may further improve model performance. Recent development in the field of Deep Learning have exposed the underlying vulnerability of Deep Neural Network (DNN) against adversarial examples. In image classification, an adversarial example is a carefully modified image that is visually imperceptible to the original image but can cause DNN model to misclassify it. Training the network with Gaussian noise is an effective technique to perform model regularization, thus improving model robustness against input variation. Inspired by this classical method, we explore to utilize the regularization characteristic of noise injection to improve DNN's robustness against adversarial attack. In this work, we propose Parametric-Noise-Injection (PNI) which involves trainable Gaussian noise injection at each layer on either activation or weights through solving the min-max optimization problem, embedded with adversarial training. These parameters are trained explicitly to achieve improved robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses trainable noise injection to improve network robustness against adversarial attacks, rather than manually configuring the injected noise level through cross-validation. The extensive results show that our proposed PNI technique effectively improves the robustness against a variety of powerful white-box and black-box attacks such as PGD, C & W, FGSM, transferable attack and ZOO attack. Last but not the least, PNI method improves both clean- and perturbed-data accuracy in comparison to the state-of-the-art defense methods, which outperforms current unbroken PGD defense by 1.1 and 6.8 on clean test data and perturbed test data respectively using Resnet-20 architecture. Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on large-scale datasets have exhibited significant performance in image classification. Many large-scale datasets are collected from websites, however they tend to contain inaccurate labels that are termed as noisy labels. Training on such noisy labeled datasets causes performance degradation because DNNs easily overfit to noisy labels. To overcome this problem, we propose a joint optimization framework of learning DNN parameters and estimating true labels. Our framework can correct labels during training by alternating update of network parameters and labels. We conduct experiments on the noisy CIFAR-10 datasets and the Clothing1M dataset. The results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Recently there has been a lot of work on pruning filters from deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the intention of reducing computations. The key idea is to rank the filters based on a certain criterion (say, l1-norm, average percentage of zeros, etc) and retain only the top ranked filters. Once the low scoring filters are pruned away the remainder of the network is fine tuned and is shown to give performance comparable to the original unpruned network. In this work, we report experiments which suggest that the comparable performance of the pruned network is not due to the specific criterion chosen but due to the inherent plasticity of deep neural networks which allows them to recover from the loss of pruned filters once the rest of the filters are fine-tuned. Specifically, we show counter-intuitive results wherein by randomly pruning 25-50 filters from deep CNNs we are able to obtain the same performance as obtained by using state of the art pruning methods. We empirically validate our claims by doing an exhaustive evaluation with VGG-16 and ResNet-50. Further, we also evaluate a real world scenario where a CNN trained on all 1000 ImageNet classes needs to be tested on only a small set of classes at test time (say, only animals). We create a new benchmark dataset from ImageNet to evaluate such class specific pruning and show that even here a random pruning strategy gives close to state of the art performance. Lastly, unlike existing approaches which mainly focus on the task of image classification, in this work we also report results on object detection. We show that using a simple random pruning strategy we can achieve significant speed up in object detection (74 improvement in fps) while retaining the same accuracy as that of the original Faster RCNN model. Abstract: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance in high level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection. This work brings together methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models for addressing the task of pixel-level classification (also called "semantic image segmentation"). We show that responses at the final layer of DCNNs are not sufficiently localized for accurate object segmentation. This is due to the very invariance properties that make DCNNs good for high level tasks. We overcome this poor localization property of deep networks by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF). Qualitatively, our "DeepLab" system is able to localize segment boundaries at a level of accuracy which is beyond previous methods. Quantitatively, our method sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 71.6 IOU accuracy in the test set. We show how these results can be obtained efficiently: Careful network re-purposing and a novel application of the 'hole' algorithm from the wavelet community allow dense computation of neural net responses at 8 frames per second on a modern GPU. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance in high level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection. This work brings together methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models for addressing the task of pixel-level classification (also called "semantic image segmentation"). We show that responses at the final layer of DCNNs are not sufficiently localized for accurate object segmentation. This is due to the very invariance properties that make DCNNs good for high level tasks. We overcome this poor localization property of deep networks by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF). Qualitatively, our "DeepLab" system is able to localize segment boundaries at a level of accuracy which is beyond previous methods. Quantitatively, our method sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 71.6 IOU accuracy in the test set. We show how these results can be obtained efficiently: Careful network re-purposing and a novel application of the 'hole' algorithm from the wavelet community allow dense computation of neural net responses at 8 frames per second on a modern GPU. Recent work has shown deep neural networks (DNNs) to be highly susceptible to well-designed, small perturbations at the input layer, or so-called adversarial examples. Taking images as an example, such distortions are often imperceptible, but can result in 100 mis-classification for a state of the art DNN. We study the structure of adversarial examples and explore network topology, pre-processing and training strategies to improve the robustness of DNNs. We perform various experiments to assess the removability of adversarial examples by corrupting with additional noise and pre-processing with denoising autoencoders (DAEs). We find that DAEs can remove substantial amounts of the adversarial noise. How- ever, when stacking the DAE with the original DNN, the resulting network can again be attacked by new adversarial examples with even smaller distortion. As a solution, we propose Deep Contractive Network, a model with a new end-to-end training procedure that includes a smoothness penalty inspired by the contractive autoencoder (CAE). This increases the network robustness to adversarial examples, without a significant performance penalty. While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive success in image denoising with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), their performance remains limited on real-world noisy photographs. The main reason is that their learned models are easy to overfit on the simplified AWGN model which deviates severely from the complicated real-world noise model. In order to improve the generalization ability of deep CNN denoisers, we suggest training a convolutional blind denoising network (CBDNet) with more realistic noise model and real-world noisy-clean image pairs. On the one hand, both signal-dependent noise and in-camera signal processing pipeline is considered to synthesize realistic noisy images. On the other hand, real-world noisy photographs and their nearly noise-free counterparts are also included to train our CBDNet. To further provide an interactive strategy to rectify denoising result conveniently, a noise estimation subnetwork with asymmetric learning to suppress under-estimation of noise level is embedded into CBDNet. Extensive experimental results on three datasets of real-world noisy photographs clearly demonstrate the superior performance of CBDNet over state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The code has been made available at this https URL.