Service robots are expected to be more autonomous and efficiently work in human-centric environments. For this type of robots, open-ended object recognition is a challenging task due to the high demand for two essential capabilities: (i) the accurate and real-time response, and (ii) the ability to learn new object categories from very few examples on-site. These capabilities are required for such robots since no matter how extensive the training data used for batch learning, the robot might be faced with an unknown object when operating in everyday environments. In this work, we present OrthographicNet, a deep transfer learning based approach, for 3D object recognition in open-ended domains. In particular, OrthographicNet generates a rotation and scale invariant global feature for a given object, enabling to recognize the same or similar objects seen from different perspectives. Experimental results show that our approach yields significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art approaches concerning scalability, memory usage, and object recognition performance. Regarding real-time performance, two real-world demonstrations validate the promising performance of the proposed architecture. Moreover, our approach demonstrates the capability of learning from very few training examples in a real-world setting.
We also investigate the ability to learn novel classes quickly, which is formulated as a transfer learning problem. Recent deep transfer learning approaches assumed that large amounts of training data are available for novel classes @cite_3 . For such situations the strength of pre-trained CNNs for extracting features is well known @cite_3 @cite_23 . Unlike our approach, CNN-based approaches are not scale and rotation invariant. Several researchers try to solve the issue qualitatively using data augmentation either using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) @cite_13 or by modifying images by translation, flipping, rotating and adding noise @cite_34 i.e., CNNs are still required to learn the rotation equivariance properties from the data @cite_15 @cite_30 . Furthermore, unlike these CNN-based approaches, we assume that the training instances are extracted from on-site experiences of a robot, and thus become gradually available over time, rather than being completely or partially available at the beginning of the learning process. Moreover, in our approach the set of classes is continuously growing while in the mentioned deep transfer learning approaches the set of classes is predefined.
@cite_30 @cite_3 @cite_23 @cite_15 @cite_34 @cite_13
2952054889 2953391683 2951770173 2783820753
We introduce Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs), a natural generalization of convolutional neural networks that reduces sample complexity by exploiting symmetries. G-CNNs use G-convolutions, a new type of layer that enjoys a substantially higher degree of weight sharing than regular convolution layers. G-convolutions increase the expressive capacity of the network without increasing the number of parameters. Group convolution layers are easy to use and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead for discrete groups generated by translations, reflections and rotations. G-CNNs achieve state of the art results on CIFAR10 and rotated MNIST. Recent results indicate that the generic descriptors extracted from the convolutional neural networks are very powerful. This paper adds to the mounting evidence that this is indeed the case. We report on a series of experiments conducted for different recognition tasks using the publicly available code and model of the network which was trained to perform object classification on ILSVRC13. We use features extracted from the network as a generic image representation to tackle the diverse range of recognition tasks of object image classification, scene recognition, fine grained recognition, attribute detection and image retrieval applied to a diverse set of datasets. We selected these tasks and datasets as they gradually move further away from the original task and data the network was trained to solve. Astonishingly, we report consistent superior results compared to the highly tuned state-of-the-art systems in all the visual classification tasks on various datasets. For instance retrieval it consistently outperforms low memory footprint methods except for sculptures dataset. The results are achieved using a linear SVM classifier (or @math distance in case of retrieval) applied to a feature representation of size 4096 extracted from a layer in the net. The representations are further modified using simple augmentation techniques e.g. jittering. The results strongly suggest that features obtained from deep learning with convolutional nets should be the primary candidate in most visual recognition tasks. Many classes of images exhibit rotational symmetry. Convolutional neural networks are sometimes trained using data augmentation to exploit this, but they are still required to learn the rotation equivariance properties from the data. Encoding these properties into the network architecture, as we are already used to doing for translation equivariance by using convolutional layers, could result in a more efficient use of the parameter budget by relieving the model from learning them. We introduce four operations which can be inserted into neural network models as layers, and which can be combined to make these models partially equivariant to rotations. They also enable parameter sharing across different orientations. We evaluate the effect of these architectural modifications on three datasets which exhibit rotational symmetry and demonstrate improved performance with smaller models. Humans can quickly learn new visual concepts, perhaps because they can easily visualize or imagine what novel objects look like from different views. Incorporating this ability to hallucinate novel instances of new concepts might help machine vision systems perform better low-shot learning, i.e., learning concepts from few examples. We present a novel approach to low-shot learning that uses this idea. Our approach builds on recent progress in meta-learning ("learning to learn") by combining a meta-learner with a "hallucinator" that produces additional training examples, and optimizing both models jointly. Our hallucinator can be incorporated into a variety of meta-learners and provides significant gains: up to a 6 point boost in classification accuracy when only a single training example is available, yielding state-of-the-art performance on the challenging ImageNet low-shot classification benchmark.