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Visualizing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Natural Pre-images

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Abstract

Image representations, from SIFT and bag of visual words to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a crucial component of almost all computer vision systems. However, our understanding of them remains limited. In this paper we study several landmark representations, both shallow and deep, by a number of complementary visualization techniques. These visualizations are based on the concept of “natural pre-image”, namely a natural-looking image whose representation has some notable property. We study in particular three such visualizations: inversion, in which the aim is to reconstruct an image from its representation, activation maximization, in which we search for patterns that maximally stimulate a representation component, and caricaturization, in which the visual patterns that a representation detects in an image are exaggerated. We pose these as a regularized energy-minimization framework and demonstrate its generality and effectiveness. In particular, we show that this method can invert representations such as HOG more accurately than recent alternatives while being applicable to CNNs too. Among our findings, we show that several layers in CNNs retain photographically accurate information about the image, with different degrees of geometric and photometric invariance.

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Notes

  1. It is referred to as TV norm in Mahendran and Vedaldi (2015) but for \(\beta =2\) this is actually the quadratic norm.

  2. In the following, the image \(\mathbf {x}\) is assumed to have null mean, as required by most CNN implementations.

  3. This requires addressing a few more subtleties. Please see files dsift_net.m and hog_net.m for details.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the ERC StG IDIU for Andrea Vedaldi and of BP for Aravindh Mahendran.

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  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Aravindh Mahendran & Andrea Vedaldi

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  1. Aravindh Mahendran
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  2. Andrea Vedaldi
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Correspondence to Aravindh Mahendran.

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Communicated by Cordelia Schmid.

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Mahendran, A., Vedaldi, A. Visualizing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Using Natural Pre-images. Int J Comput Vis 120, 233–255 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-016-0911-8

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