Several machine learning tasks require to represent the data using only a sparse set of interest points. An ideal detector is able to find the corresponding interest points even if the data undergo a transformation typical for a given domain. Since the task is of high practical interest in computer vision, many hand-crafted solutions were proposed. In this paper, we ask a fundamental question: can we learn such detectors from scratch? Since it is often unclear what points are "interesting", human labelling cannot be used to find a truly unbiased solution. Therefore, the task requires an unsupervised formulation. We are the first to propose such a formulation: training a neural network to rank points in a transformation-invariant manner. Interest points are then extracted from the top bottom quantiles of this ranking. We validate our approach on two tasks: standard RGB image interest point detection and challenging cross-modal interest point detection between RGB and depth images. We quantitatively show that our unsupervised method performs better or on-par with baselines.
Currently, unsupervised learning comprises many directions: learning the distribution that best explains data (Gaussian Mixture Models learned via an EM-algorithm @cite_1 , Restricted Boltzmann Machines @cite_17 , Generative Adversarial Nets @cite_11 ), clustering, dimensionality reduction and unsupervised segmentation (kMeans @cite_18 , LLE @cite_24 , Isomap @cite_16 , PCA @cite_25 , Normalized Cuts @cite_26 , t-SNE @cite_2 ), learning to simulate task solvers (when a solution is provided by the solver and the task is automatically generated @cite_23 , @cite_37 ), and learning data representation suitable for further use in some other task (autoencoders @cite_29 , deep convolutional adversarial nets @cite_32 , learning by context prediction @cite_19 , learning from tracking in videos @cite_36 , metric learning @cite_33 , learning by predicting inpainting @cite_9 , learning by solving jigsaw puzzles @cite_31 ).
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_37 @cite_33 @cite_36 @cite_29 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_16 @cite_25 @cite_11
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Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similar striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The promise of unsupervised learning methods lies in their potential to use vast amounts of unlabeled data to learn complex, highly nonlinear models with millions of free parameters. We consider two well-known unsupervised learning models, deep belief networks (DBNs) and sparse coding, that have recently been applied to a flurry of machine learning applications (Hinton & Salakhutdinov, 2006; , 2007). Unfortunately, current learning algorithms for both models are too slow for large-scale applications, forcing researchers to focus on smaller-scale models, or to use fewer training examples. In this paper, we suggest massively parallel methods to help resolve these problems. We argue that modern graphics processors far surpass the computational capabilities of multicore CPUs, and have the potential to revolutionize the applicability of deep unsupervised learning methods. We develop general principles for massively parallelizing unsupervised learning tasks using graphics processors. We show that these principles can be applied to successfully scaling up learning algorithms for both DBNs and sparse coding. Our implementation of DBN learning is up to 70 times faster than a dual-core CPU implementation for large models. For example, we are able to reduce the time required to learn a four-layer DBN with 100 million free parameters from several weeks to around a single day. For sparse coding, we develop a simple, inherently parallel algorithm, that leads to a 5 to 15-fold speedup over previous methods. Unsupervised learning algorithms aim to discover the structure hidden in the data, and to learn representations that are more suitable as input to a supervised machine than the raw input. Many unsupervised methods are based on reconstructing the input from the representation, while constraining the representation to have certain desirable properties (e.g. low dimension, sparsity, etc). Others are based on approximating density by stochastically reconstructing the input from the representation. We describe a novel and efficient algorithm to learn sparse representations, and compare it theoretically and experimentally with a similar machine trained probabilistically, namely a Restricted Boltzmann Machine. We propose a simple criterion to compare and select different unsupervised machines based on the trade-off between the reconstruction error and the information content of the representation. We demonstrate this method by extracting features from a dataset of handwritten numerals, and from a dataset of natural image patches. We show that by stacking multiple levels of such machines and by training sequentially, high-order dependencies between the input observed variables can be captured.