Backbones-Review: Feature Extraction Networks for Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning Approaches

To understand the real world using various types of data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most used technique nowadays. While finding the pattern within the analyzed data represents the main task. This is performed by extracting representative features step, which is proceeded using the statistical algorithms or using some specific filters. However, the selection of useful features from large-scale data represented a crucial challenge. Now, with the development of convolution neural networks (CNNs), the feature extraction operation has become more automatic and easier. CNNs allow to work on large-scale size of data, as well as cover different scenarios for a specific task. For computer vision tasks, convolutional networks are used to extract features also for the other parts of a deep learning model. The selection of a suitable network for feature extraction or the other parts of a DL model is not random work. So, the implementation of such a model can be related to the target task as well as the computational complexity of it. Many networks have been proposed and become the famous networks used for any DL models in any AI task. These networks are exploited for feature extraction or at the beginning of any DL model which is named backbones. A backbone is a known network trained in many other tasks before and demonstrates its effectiveness. In this paper, an overview of the existing backbones, e.g. VGGs, ResNets, DenseNet, etc, is given with a detailed description. Also, a couple of computer vision tasks are discussed by providing a review of each task regarding the backbones used. In addition, a comparison in terms of performance is also provided, based on the backbone used for each task.

Image inpainting: A review

Although image inpainting, or the art of repairing the old and deteriorated images, has been around for many years, it has gained even more popularity because of the recent development in image processing techniques. With the improvement of image processing tools and the flexibility of digital image editing, automatic image inpainting has found important applications in computer vision and has also become an important and challenging topic of research in image processing. This paper is a brief review of the existing image inpainting approaches we first present a global vision on the existing methods for image inpainting. We attempt to collect most of the existing approaches and classify them into three categories, namely, sequential-based, CNN-based and GAN-based methods. In addition, for each category, a list of methods for the different types of distortion on the images is presented. Furthermore, collect a list of the available datasets and discuss these in our paper. This is a contribution for digital image inpainting researchers trying to look for the available datasets because there is a lack of datasets available for image inpainting. As the final step in this overview, we present the results of real evaluations of the three categories of image inpainting methods performed on the datasets used, for the different types of image distortion. In the end, we also present the evaluations metrics and discuss the performance of these methods in terms of these metrics. This overview can be used as a reference for image inpainting researchers, and it can also facilitate the comparison of the methods as well as the datasets used. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of the three categories of image inpainting methods along with a list of available datasets that the researchers can use to evaluate their proposed methodology against.