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Title: Polar Transformer Networks

Paper content:
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently equivariant to translation.
Efforts to embed other forms of equivariance have concentrated solely on rotation.
We expand the notion of equivariance in CNNs through the Polar Transformer Network (PTN).
PTN combines ideas from the Spatial Transformer Network (STN) and canonical coordinate representations.
The result is a network invariant to translation and equivariant to both rotation and scale.
PTN is trained end-to-end and composed of three distinct stages: a polar origin predictor, the newly introduced polar transformer module and a classifier.
PTN achieves state-of-the-art on rotated MNIST and the newly introduced SIM2MNIST dataset, an MNIST variation obtained by adding clutter and perturbing digits with translation, rotation and scaling.
The ideas of PTN are extensible to 3D which we demonstrate through the Cylindrical Transformer Network.
Whether at the global pattern or local feature level BID8 , the quest for (in/equi)variant representations is as old as the field of computer vision and pattern recognition itself.
State-of-the-art in "hand-crafted" approaches is typified by SIFT (Lowe, 2004) .
These detector/descriptors identify the intrinsic scale or rotation of a region BID19 BID1 and produce an equivariant descriptor which is normalized for scale and/or rotation invariance.
The burden of these methods is in the computation of the orbit (i.e. a sampling the transformation space) which is necessary to achieve equivariance.
This motivated steerable filtering which guarantees transformed filter responses can be interpolated from a finite number of filter responses.
Steerability was proved for rotations of Gaussian derivatives BID6 and extended to scale and translations in the shiftable pyramid BID31 .
Use of the orbit and SVD to create a filter basis was proposed by BID26 and in parallel, BID29 proved for certain classes of transformations there exists canonical coordinates where deformation of the input presents as translation of the output.
Following this work, BID25 and BID10 ; Teo & BID33 proposed a methodology for computing the bases of equivariant spaces given the Lie generators of a transformation.
and most recently, BID30 proposed the scattering transform which offers representations invariant to translation, scaling, and rotations.The current consensus is representations should be learned not designed.
Equivariance to translations by convolution and invariance to local deformations by pooling are now textbook BID17 , p.335) but approaches to equivariance of more general deformations are still maturing.
The main veins are: Spatial Transformer Network (STN) BID13 which similarly to SIFT learn a canonical pose and produce an invariant representation through warping, work which constrains the structure of convolutional filters BID36 and work which uses the filter orbit BID3 to enforce an equivariance to a specific transformation group.In this paper, we propose the Polar Transformer Network (PTN), which combines the ideas of STN and canonical coordinate representations to achieve equivariance to translations, rotations, and dilations.
The three stage network learns to identify the object center then transforms the input into logpolar coordinates.
In this coordinate system, planar convolutions correspond to group-convolutions in rotation and scale.
PTN produces a representation equivariant to rotations and dilations without http://github.com/daniilidis-group//polar-transformer-networks Figure 1 : In the log-polar representation, rotations around the origin become vertical shifts, and dilations around the origin become horizontal shifts.
The distance between the yellow and green lines is proportional to the rotation angle/scale factor.
Top rows: sequence of rotations, and the corresponding polar images.
Bottom rows: sequence of dilations, and the corresponding polar images.the challenging parameter regression of STN.
We enlarge the notion of equivariance in CNNs beyond Harmonic Networks BID36 and Group Convolutions BID3 by capturing both rotations and dilations of arbitrary precision.
Similar to STN; however, PTN accommodates only global deformations.We present state-of-the-art performance on rotated MNIST and SIM2MNIST, which we introduce.
To summarize our contributions:• We develop a CNN architecture capable of learning an image representation invariant to translation and equivariant to rotation and dilation.•
We propose the polar transformer module, which performs a differentiable log-polar transform, amenable to backpropagation training. The
transform origin is a latent variable.• We
show how the polar transform origin can be learned effectively as the centroid of a single channel heatmap predicted by a fully convolutional network.
We have proposed a novel network whose output is invariant to translations and equivariant to the group of dilations/rotations.
We have combined the idea of learning the translation (similar to the spatial transformer) but providing equivariance for the scaling and rotation, avoiding, thus, fully connected layers required for the pose regression in the spatial transformer.
Equivariance with respect to dilated rotations is achieved by convolution in this group.
Such a convolution would require the production of multiple group copies, however, we avoid this by transforming into canonical coordinates.
We improve the state of the art performance on rotated MNIST by a large margin, and outperform all other tested methods on a new dataset we call SIM2MNIST.
We expect our approach to be applicable to other problems, where the presence of different orientations and scales hinder the performance of conventional CNNs.

assistant: text: We learn feature maps invariant to translation, and equivariant to rotation and scale.