Title: Deformable Classifiers,
Abstract: Geometric variations of objects, which do not modify the object class, pose a
major challenge for object recognition. These variations could be rigid as well
as non-rigid transformations. In this paper, we design a framework for training
deformable classifiers, where latent transformation variables are introduced,
and a transformation of the object image to a reference instantiation is
computed in terms of the classifier output, separately for each class. The
classifier outputs for each class, after transformation, are compared to yield
the final decision. As a by-product of the classification this yields a
transformation of the input object to a reference pose, which can be used for
downstream tasks such as the computation of object support. We apply a two-step
training mechanism for our framework, which alternates between optimizing over
the latent transformation variables and the classifier parameters to minimize
the loss function. We show that multilayer perceptrons, also known as deep
networks, are well suited for this approach and achieve state of the art
results on the rotated MNIST and the Google Earth dataset, and produce
competitive results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 when training on smaller subsets of
training data.