The convolutional neural networks (CNN) like AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGGNet, etc. have been proven as the very discriminative feature descriptor for many computer vision problems. The trained CNN model over one dataset performs reasonably well over another dataset of similar type and outperforms the hand-designed feature descriptor. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) layer discards some information in order to introduce the non-linearity. In this paper, it is proposed that the discriminative ability of deep image representation using trained model can be improved by Average Biased ReLU (AB-ReLU) at last few layers. Basically, AB-ReLU improves the discriminative ability by two ways: 1) it also exploits some of the discriminative and discarded negative information of ReLU and 2) it kills the irrelevant and positive information used by ReLU. The VGGFace model already trained in MatConvNet over the VGG-Face dataset is used as the feature descriptor for face retrieval over other face datasets. The proposed approach is tested over six challenging unconstrained and robust face datasets like PubFig, LFW, PaSC, AR, etc. in retrieval framework. It is observed that AB-ReLU is consistently performed better than ReLU using VGGFace pretrained model over face datasets.
The goal of this paper is face recognition – from either a single photograph or from a set of faces tracked in a video. Recent progress in this area has been due to two factors: (i) end to end learning for the task using a convolutional neural network (CNN), and (ii) the availability of very large scale training datasets. We make two contributions: first, we show how a very large scale dataset (2.6M images, over 2.6K people) can be assembled by a combination of automation and human in the loop, and discuss the trade off between data purity and time; second, we traverse through the complexities of deep network training and face recognition to present methods and procedures to achieve comparable state of the art results on the standard LFW and YTF face benchmarks. MatConvNet is an implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for MATLAB. The toolbox is designed with an emphasis on simplicity and flexibility. It exposes the building blocks of CNNs as easy-to-use MATLAB functions, providing routines for computing linear convolutions with filter banks, feature pooling, and many more. In this manner, MatConvNet allows fast prototyping of new CNN architectures; at the same time, it supports efficient computation on CPU and GPU allowing to train complex models on large datasets such as ImageNet ILSVRC. This document provides an overview of CNNs and how they are implemented in MatConvNet and gives the technical details of each computational block in the toolbox.