Deep Learning Srihari
Applications: Computer Vision
Sargur N. Srihari
srihari@cedar.buffalo.edu
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Deep Learning Srihari
Topics in Applications
1. Large-Scale Deep Learning
2. Computer Vision
3. Speech Recognition
4. Natural Language Processing
5. Other Applications
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Deep Learning Srihari
Topics in Computer Vision
• Overview
• Preprocessing
– Contrast Normalization
– Dataset Augmentation
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Deep Learning Srihari
Computer Vision and Deep Learning
• Computer Vision is one of the most active
areas for deep learning research, since
– Vision is a task effortless for humans but difficult for
computers
• Standard benchmarks for deep learning
algorithms are:
– object recognition
– OCR
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Deep Learning Srihari
Common tasks
• Small core of AI goals aimed at replicating
human abilities
– Object recognition
– Detection of some form
• Which object is present?
• Annotating an image with bounding boxes around each
object
• Transcribing a sequence of symbols from image
• Labeling each pixel with identity of object it belongs
– Image synthesis
• Because generative models are a guiding principle
behind deep learning, large body of work on synthesis5
Preprocessing
Deep Learning Srihari
• Some deep learning needs much
preprocessing
• Computer vision requires little preprocessing
– Pixel range
• Images should be standardized, so pixels lie in same
range [0,1], [-1,1], or [0,255] etc
– Picture size
• Some architectures need a standard size. So images may
need to be scaled
• May not be needed with convolutional models which
dynamically adjust size of pooling regions
– Data set augmentation 6
• Can be seen as a preprocessing step for training set
Deep Learning Srihari
Training with large data sets
• Large data sets (Imagenet) & models (Alexnet)
– No preprocessing
– Learns invariances
• Alexnet for Imagenet has one preprocessor
– Subtract mean across training examples of pixels
– Dataset: ILSVRC subset of ImageNet: 1000 images in each
of 1000 categories: 1.2m training, 50k validation, 150k testing
– Architecture: CNN with 5 conv layers, max-pool layers,
dropout layers, 3 fully connected layers.
– Performance: top 5 error rate= 15.4% next was 26.2% 7
Deep Learning Srihari
Contrast Normalization
• Image contrast can be safely removed
• Contrast refers to the magnitude of the
difference between bright and dark pixels
• In deep learning different definition
– Contrast = standard deviation of pixels
– For image with r rows and c columns, and RGB
image, contrast of entire image is
where
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• When std dev is high, values differ more from mean
Deep Learning Srihari
Global Contrast Normalization
• Aims to prevent images from having varying
amounts of contrast
• Subtract mean from each image, then rescale it
so that std dev across pixels equals constant s
• Given an input image X, GCN produces an X’
• 𝜆 is a positive regularization term to bias the std
deviation, the denominator is constrained to be
at least 𝜀 9
Deep Learning Srihari
GCN maps examples onto sphere
• Raw input data may have any norm
• 𝜆=0 maps all nonzero examples onto sphere
• 𝜆>0 draws examples towards sphere but does
not discard variations in norm
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Deep Learning Srihari
Local Contrast Normalization
• Contrast is normalized across each small
window rather than entire image
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Deep Learning Srihari
Dataset Augmentation
• Increasing training set by adding modified
training examples
– with transformations that do not change the class
• Object recognition is helped because input may
be transformed with many geometric operations
– Classifiers benefit from random translations,
rotations, flips of the input
• In specialized vision applications:
– Perturbations of colors
– Nonlinear geometric transformations of input
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