RADAM: Texture Recognition through Randomized Aggregated Encoding of Deep Activation Maps

Texture analysis is a classical yet challenging task in computer vision for which deep neural networks are actively being applied. Most approaches are based on building feature aggregation modules around a pre-trained backbone and then fine-tuning the new architecture on specific texture recognition tasks. Here we propose a new method named \textbf{R}andom encoding of \textbf{A}ggregated \textbf{D}eep \textbf{A}ctivation \textbf{M}aps (RADAM) which extracts rich texture representations without ever changing the backbone. The technique consists of encoding the output at different depths of a pre-trained deep convolutional network using a Randomized Autoencoder (RAE). The RAE is trained locally to each image using a closed-form solution, and its decoder weights are used to compose a 1-dimensional texture representation that is fed into a linear SVM. This means that no fine-tuning or backpropagation is needed. We explore RADAM on several texture benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art results with different computational budgets. Our results suggest that pre-trained backbones may not require additional fine-tuning for texture recognition if their learned representations are better encoded.

Multi-q Analysis of Image Patterns

This paper studies the use of the Tsallis Entropy versus the classic Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy for classifying image patterns. Given a database of 40 pattern classes, the goal is to determine the class of a given image sample. Our experiments show that the Tsallis entropy encoded in a feature vector for different $q$ indices has great advantage over the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy for pattern classification, boosting recognition rates by a factor of 3. We discuss the reasons behind this success, shedding light on the usefulness of the Tsallis entropy.