Recognition of defects in concrete infrastructure, especially in bridges, is a costly and time consuming crucial first step in the assessment of the structural integrity. Large variation in appearance of the concrete material, changing illumination and weather conditions, a variety of possible surface markings as well as the possibility for different types of defects to overlap, make it a challenging real-world task. In this work we introduce the novel COncrete DEfect BRidge IMage dataset (CODEBRIM) for multi-target classification of five commonly appearing concrete defects. We investigate and compare two reinforcement learning based meta-learning approaches, MetaQNN and efficient neural architecture search, to find suitable convolutional neural network architectures for this challenging multi-class multi-target task. We show that learned architectures have fewer overall parameters in addition to yielding better multi-target accuracy in comparison to popular neural architectures from the literature evaluated in the context of our application.
 We adapt the CNN architecture to texture analysis.We introduce an energy layer to discard the overall shape information and focus on texture features.We evaluate the domain transferability and the depth of networks that are from scratch or pretrained.Our network is simpler than a classic CNN and obtains better classification results on texture datasets.We combine our texture CNN to a classic CNN (overall shape analysis) and further improve the results. Deep learning has established many new state of the art solutions in the last decade in areas such as object, scene and speech recognition. In particular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a category of deep learning which obtains excellent results in object detection and recognition tasks. Its architecture is indeed well suited to object analysis by learning and classifying complex (deep) features that represent parts of an object or the object itself. However, some of its features are very similar to texture analysis methods. CNN layers can be thought of as filter banks of complexity increasing with the depth. Filter banks are powerful tools to extract texture features and have been widely used in texture analysis. In this paper we develop a simple network architecture named Texture CNN (T-CNN) which explores this observation. It is built on the idea that the overall shape information extracted by the fully connected layers of a classic CNN is of minor importance in texture analysis. Therefore, we pool an energy measure from the last convolution layer which we connect to a fully connected layer. We show that our approach can improve the performance of a network while greatly reducing the memory usage and computation. Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections&#x2014;one between each layer and its subsequent layer&#x2014;our network has L(L+1) 2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https: github.com liuzhuang13 DenseNet. Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.  Research in texture recognition often concentrates on the problem of material recognition in uncluttered conditions, an assumption rarely met by applications. In this work we conduct a first study of material and describable texture at- tributes recognition in clutter, using a new dataset derived from the OpenSurface texture repository. Motivated by the challenge posed by this problem, we propose a new texture descriptor, D-CNN, obtained by Fisher Vector pooling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) filter bank. D-CNN substantially improves the state-of-the-art in texture, mate- rial and scene recognition. Our approach achieves 82.3 accuracy on Flickr material dataset and 81.1 accuracy on MIT indoor scenes, providing absolute gains of more than 10 over existing approaches. D-CNN easily trans- fers across domains without requiring feature adaptation as for methods that build on the fully-connected layers of CNNs. Furthermore, D-CNN can seamlessly incorporate multi-scale information and describe regions of arbitrary shapes and sizes. Our approach is particularly suited at lo- calizing stuff categories and obtains state-of-the-art re- sults on MSRC segmentation dataset, as well as promising results on recognizing materials and surface attributes in clutter on the OpenSurfaces dataset. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the 5 years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements. Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57 error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28 relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation. We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5 and 17.0 which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overriding in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3 , compared to 26.2 achieved by the second-best entry.