Representations in the auditory cortex might be based on mechanisms similar to the visual ventral stream; modules for building invariance to transformations and multiple layers for compositionality and selectivity. In this paper we propose the use of such computational modules for extracting invariant and discriminative audio representations. Building on a theory of invariance in hierarchical architectures, we propose a novel, mid-level representation for acoustical signals, using the empirical distributions of projections on a set of templates and their transformations. Under the assumption that, by construction, this dictionary of templates is composed from similar classes, and samples the orbit of variance-inducing signal transformations (such as shift and scale), the resulting signature is theoretically guaranteed to be unique, invariant to transformations and stable to deformations. Modules of projection and pooling can then constitute layers of deep networks, for learning composite representations. We present the main theoretical and computational aspects of a framework for unsupervised learning of invariant audio representations, empirically evaluated on music genre classification.
A mathematical framework that formalizes the computation of invariant and stable representations via cascaded (deep) wavelet transforms has been proposed in @cite_16 . In this work, we propose computing an audio representation through biologically plausible modules of projection and pooling, based on a theory of invariance in the ventral stream of the visual cortex @cite_19 . The proposed representation can be extended to hierarchical architectures of layers of invariance". An additional advantage is that it can be applied to building invariant representations from arbitrary signals without explicitly modeling the underlying transformations, which can be arbitrarily complex but smooth.
@cite_19 @cite_16
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Representations that are invariant to translation, scale and other transformations, can considerably reduce the sample complexity of learning, allowing recognition of new object classes from very few examples|a hallmark of human recognition. Empirical estimates of one-dimensional projections of the distribution induced by a group of ane transformations are proven to represent a unique and invariant signature associated with an image. We show how projections yielding invariant signatures for future images can be learned automatically, and updated continuously, during unsupervised visual experience. A module performing ltering and pooling, like simple and complex cells as proposed by Hubel and Wiesel, can compute such estimates. Under this view, a pooling stage estimates a one-dimensional probability distribution. Invariance from observations through a restricted window is equivalent to a sparsity property w.r.t. to a transformation, which yields templates that are a) Gabor for optimal simultaneous invariance to translation and scale or b) very specic for complex, class-dependent transformations such as rotation in depth of faces. Hierarchical architectures consisting of this basic Hubel-Wiesel module inherit its properties of invariance, stability, and discriminability while capturing the compositional organization of the visual world in terms of wholes and parts, and are invariant to complex transformations that may only be locally ane. The theory applies to several existing deep learning convolutional architectures for image and speech recognition. It also suggests that the main computational goal of the ventral stream of visual cortex is to provide a hierarchical representation of new objects images which is invariant to transformations, stable, and discriminative for recognition|and that this representation may be continuously learned in an unsupervised way during development and natural visual experience. Inspired by the early visual system of many mammalians we consider the construction of-and reconstruction from- an orientation score @math as a local orientation representation of an image, @math . The mapping @math is a wavelet transform @math corresponding to a reducible representation of the Euclidean motion group onto @math and oriented wavelet @math . This wavelet transform is a special case of a recently developed generalization of the standard wavelet theory and has the practical advantage over the usual wavelet approaches in image analysis (constructed by irreducible representations of the similitude group) that it allows a stable reconstruction from one (single scale) orientation score. Since our wavelet transform is a unitary mapping with stable inverse, we directly relate operations on orientation scores to operations on images in a robust manner. Furthermore, by geometrical examination of the Euclidean motion group @math , which is the domain of our orientation scores, we deduce that an operator ? on orientation scores must be left invariant to ensure that the corresponding operator @math on images is Euclidean invariant. As an example we consider all linear second order left invariant evolutions on orientation scores corresponding to stochastic processes on G. As an application we detect elongated structures in (medical) images and automatically close the gaps between them. Finally, we consider robust orientation estimates by means of channel representations, where we combine robust orientation estimation and learning of wavelets resulting in an auto-associative processing of orientation features. Here linear averaging of the channel representation is equivalent to robust orientation estimation and an adaptation of the wavelet to the statistics of the considered image class leads to an auto-associative behavior of the system. Despite the importance of image representations such as histograms of oriented gradients and deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), our theoretical understanding of them remains limited. Aiming at filling this gap, we investigate three key mathematical properties of representations: equivariance, invariance, and equivalence. Equivariance studies how transformations of the input image are encoded by the representation, invariance being a special case where a transformation has no effect. Equivalence studies whether two representations, for example two different parametrisations of a CNN, capture the same visual information or not. A number of methods to establish these properties empirically are proposed, including introducing transformation and stitching layers in CNNs. These methods are then applied to popular representations to reveal insightful aspects of their structure, including clarifying at which layers in a CNN certain geometric invariances are achieved. While the focus of the paper is theoretical, direct applications to structured-output regression are demonstrated too. Despite the importance of image representations such as histograms of oriented gradients and deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), our theoretical understanding of them remains limited. Aiming at filling this gap, we investigate three key mathematical properties of representations: equivariance, invariance, and equivalence. Equivariance studies how transformations of the input image are encoded by the representation, invariance being a special case where a transformation has no effect. Equivalence studies whether two representations, for example two different parametrisations of a CNN, capture the same visual information or not. A number of methods to establish these properties empirically are proposed, including introducing transformation and stitching layers in CNNs. These methods are then applied to popular representations to reveal insightful aspects of their structure, including clarifying at which layers in a CNN certain geometric invariances are achieved. While the focus of the paper is theoretical, direct applications to structured-output regression are demonstrated too.