Many real world tasks such as reasoning and physical interaction require identification and manipulation of conceptual entities. A first step towards solving these tasks is the automated discovery of distributed symbol-like representations. In this paper, we explicitly formalize this problem as inference in a spatial mixture model where each component is parametrized by a neural network. Based on the Expectation Maximization framework we then derive a differentiable clustering method that simultaneously learns how to group and represent individual entities. We evaluate our method on the (sequential) perceptual grouping task and find that it is able to accurately recover the constituent objects. We demonstrate that the learned representations are useful for next-step prediction.
Unsupervised Segmentation has been studied in several different contexts @cite_2 , from random vectors @cite_32 over texture segmentation @cite_36 to images @cite_10 @cite_4 . Early work in unsupervised video segmentation @cite_19 used generalized Expectation Maximization (EM) to infer how to split frames of moving sprites. More recently optical flow has been used to train convolutional networks to do figure ground segmentation @cite_14 @cite_29 . A related line of work under the term of multi-causal modelling @cite_30 has formalized perceptual grouping as inference in a generative compositional model of images. Masked RBMs for example extend Restricted Boltzmann Machines with a latent mask inferred through Block-Gibbs sampling.
@cite_30 @cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_36 @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_10
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Abstract We present a novel method to segment retinal images using ensemble learning based convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. An entropy sampling technique is used to select informative points thus reducing computational complexity while performing superior to uniform sampling. The sampled points are used to design a novel learning framework for convolutional filters based on boosting. Filters are learned in several layers with the output of previous layers serving as the input to the next layer. A softmax logistic classifier is subsequently trained on the output of all learned filters and applied on test images. The output of the classifier is subject to an unsupervised graph cut algorithm followed by a convex hull transformation to obtain the final segmentation. Our proposed algorithm for optic cup and disc segmentation outperforms existing methods on the public DRISHTI-GS data set on several metrics. This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as pseudo ground truth to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed pretext tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce. In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First , we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or ‘atrous convolution’, as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second , we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third , we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed “DeepLab” system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online. This paper presents a novel yet intuitive approach to unsupervised feature learning. Inspired by the human visual system, we explore whether low-level motion-based grouping cues can be used to learn an effective visual representation. Specifically, we use unsupervised motion-based segmentation on videos to obtain segments, which we use as 'pseudo ground truth' to train a convolutional network to segment objects from a single frame. Given the extensive evidence that motion plays a key role in the development of the human visual system, we hope that this straightforward approach to unsupervised learning will be more effective than cleverly designed 'pretext' tasks studied in the literature. Indeed, our extensive experiments show that this is the case. When used for transfer learning on object detection, our representation significantly outperforms previous unsupervised approaches across multiple settings, especially when training data for the target task is scarce.