We explore the power of spatial context as a self-supervisory signal for learning visual representations. In particular, we propose spatial context networks that learn to predict a representation of one image patch from another image patch, within the same image, conditioned on their real-valued relative spatial offset. Unlike auto-encoders, that aim to encode and reconstruct original image patches, our network aims to encode and reconstruct intermediate representations of the spatially offset patches. As such, the network learns a spatially conditioned contextual representation. By testing performance with various patch selection mechanisms we show that focusing on object-centric patches is important, and that using object proposal as a patch selection mechanism leads to the highest improvement in performance. Further, unlike auto-encoders, context encoders [21], or other forms of unsupervised feature learning, we illustrate that contextual supervision (with pre-trained model initialization) can improve on existing pre-trained model performance. We build our spatial context networks on top of standard VGG_19 and CNN_M architectures and, among other things, show that we can achieve improvements (with no additional explicit supervision) over the original ImageNet pre-trained VGG_19 and CNN_M models in object categorization and detection on VOC2007.
Unsupervised Learning . Auto-encoders @cite_35 are among the earliest models for unsupervised deep learning. They typically learn a representation by employing an encoder-decoder architecture, which are inverses of one another; the encoder encodes the image (or patch) into a compact hidden state representation and the decoder reconstructs it back to a full image. De-noising auto-encoders @cite_12 reconstruct images (or patches) subject to local corruptions. The most extreme variant of de-noising auto-encoders are the context encoders @cite_23 , which aim to reconstruct a large hole (patch) given its surrounding spatial context.
@cite_35 @cite_23 @cite_12
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We describe a novel unsupervised method for learning sparse, overcomplete features. The model uses a linear encoder, and a linear decoder preceded by a sparsifying non-linearity that turns a code vector into a quasi-binary sparse code vector. Given an input, the optimal code minimizes the distance between the output of the decoder and the input patch while being as similar as possible to the encoder output. Learning proceeds in a two-phase EM-like fashion: (1) compute the minimum-energy code vector, (2) adjust the parameters of the encoder and decoder so as to decrease the energy. The model produces "stroke detectors" when trained on handwritten numerals, and Gabor-like filters when trained on natural image patches. Inference and learning are very fast, requiring no preprocessing, and no expensive sampling. Using the proposed unsupervised method to initialize the first layer of a convolutional network, we achieved an error rate slightly lower than the best reported result on the MNIST dataset. Finally, an extension of the method is described to learn topographical filter maps. We present an unsupervised visual feature learning algorithm driven by context-based pixel prediction. By analogy with auto-encoders, we propose Context Encoders -- a convolutional neural network trained to generate the contents of an arbitrary image region conditioned on its surroundings. In order to succeed at this task, context encoders need to both understand the content of the entire image, as well as produce a plausible hypothesis for the missing part(s). When training context encoders, we have experimented with both a standard pixel-wise reconstruction loss, as well as a reconstruction plus an adversarial loss. The latter produces much sharper results because it can better handle multiple modes in the output. We found that a context encoder learns a representation that captures not just appearance but also the semantics of visual structures. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned features for CNN pre-training on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, context encoders can be used for semantic inpainting tasks, either stand-alone or as initialization for non-parametric methods. We present an unsupervised visual feature learning algorithm driven by context-based pixel prediction. By analogy with auto-encoders, we propose Context Encoders – a convolutional neural network trained to generate the contents of an arbitrary image region conditioned on its surroundings. In order to succeed at this task, context encoders need to both understand the content of the entire image, as well as produce a plausible hypothesis for the missing part(s). When training context encoders, we have experimented with both a standard pixel-wise reconstruction loss, as well as a reconstruction plus an adversarial loss. The latter produces much sharper results because it can better handle multiple modes in the output. We found that a context encoder learns a representation that captures not just appearance but also the semantics of visual structures. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned features for CNN pre-training on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, context encoders can be used for semantic inpainting tasks, either stand-alone or as initialization for non-parametric methods. We aim to apply sparse autoencoder-based unsupervised feature learning to emotional semantic analysis for textile images. To tackle the problem of limited training data, we present a cross-domain feature learning scheme for emotional textile image classification using convolutional autoencoders. We further propose a correlation-analysis-based feature selection method for the weights learned by sparse autoencoders to reduce the number of features extracted from large size images. First, we randomly collect image patches on an unlabeled image dataset in the source domain and learn local features with a sparse autoencoder. We then conduct feature selection according to the correlation between different weight vectors corresponding to the autoencoder’s hidden units. We finally adopt a convolutional neural network including a pooling layer to obtain global feature activations of textile images in the target domain and send these global feature vectors into logistic regression models for emotional image classification. The cross-domain unsupervised feature learning method achieves 65 to 78 average accuracy in the cross-validation experiments corresponding to eight emotional categories and performs better than conventional methods. Feature selection can reduce the computational cost of global feature extraction by about 50 while improving classification performance.