A feature learning task involves training models that are capable of inferring good representations (transformations of the original space) from input data alone. When working with limited or unlabelled data, and also when multiple visual domains are considered, methods that rely on large annotated datasets, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), cannot be employed. In this paper we investigate different auto-encoder (AE) architectures, which require no labels, and explore training strategies to learn representations from images. The models are evaluated considering both the reconstruction error of the images and the feature spaces in terms of their discriminative power. We study the role of dense and convolutional layers on the results, as well as the depth and capacity of the networks, since those are shown to affect both the dimensionality reduction and the capability of generalising for different visual domains. Classification results with AE features were as discriminative as pre-trained CNN features. Our findings can be used as guidelines for the design of unsupervised representation learning methods within and across domains.
One of the few studies that leverage the use of auto-encoders in a cross-domain adaptation problem comes from @cite_10 ; the authors solved their low sample number problem by training an auto-encoder on an unrelated dataset with many samples and using the learned model to extract local features on their target domain; finally, they concatenated those features with a new set learned through usual CNN classifier setup on the desired domain. This study showed the potential for transfer learning with AE architectures but did not experiment with an AE-only design for their models, an application we address in this paper.
@cite_10
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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.