Integrating pixels and segments: A deep-learning method inspired by the informational diversity of the visual pathways.

Visual cortex is able to process information in multiple pathways and integrate various forms of representations. This paper proposed a bio-inspired method that utilizes the line-segment-based representation to perform a dedicated channel for the geometric feature learning process. The extracted geometric information can be integrated with the original pixel-based information and implemented on both the convolutional neural networks (SegCNN) and the stacked autoencoders (SegSAE). Segment-based operations such as segConvolve and segPooling are designed to further process the extracted geometric features. The proposed models are verified on the MNIST dataset, Caltech 101 dataset and QuickDraw dataset for image classification. According to the experimental results, the proposed models can facilitate the classification accuracies especially when the sizes of the training set are limited. Particularly, the method based on multiple representations is found to be effective for classifying the hand-drawn sketches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]