Translating or rotating an input image should not affect the results of many computer vision tasks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are already translation equivariant: input image translations produce proportionate feature map translations. This is not the case for rotations. Global rotation equivariance is typically sought through data augmentation, but patch-wise equivariance is more difficult. We present Harmonic Networks or H-Nets, a CNN exhibiting equivariance to patch-wise translation and 360-rotation. We achieve this by replacing regular CNN filters with circular harmonics, returning a maximal response and orientation for every receptive field patch. H-Nets use a rich, parameter-efficient and low computational complexity representation, and we show that deep feature maps within the network encode complicated rotational invariants. We demonstrate that our layers are general enough to be used in conjunction with the latest architectures and techniques, such as deep supervision and batch normalization. We also achieve state-of-the-art classification on rotated-MNIST, and competitive results on other benchmark challenges.
@cite_29: We introduce Group equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks (G-CNNs), a natural generalization of convolutional neural networks that reduces sample complexity by exploiting symmetries. G-CNNs use G-convolutions, a new type of layer that enjoys a substantially higher degree of weight sharing than regular convolution layers. G-convolutions increase the expressive capacity of the network without increasing the number of parameters. Group convolution layers are easy to use and can be implemented with negligible computational overhead for discrete groups generated by translations, reflections and rotations. G-CNNs achieve state of the art results on CIFAR10 and rotated MNIST.
@cite_10: 
@cite_22: We present a method for learning discriminative filters using a shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We encode rotation invariance directly in the model by tying the weights of groups of filters to several rotated versions of the canonical filter in the group. These filters can be used to extract rotation invariant features well-suited for image classification. We test this learning procedure on a texture classification benchmark, where the orientations of the training images differ from those of the test images. We obtain results comparable to the state-of-the-art. Compared to standard shallow CNNs, the proposed method obtains higher classification performance while reducing by an order of magnitude the number of parameters to be learned.
@cite_7: Dictionary learning algorithms or supervised deep convolution networks have considerably improved the efficiency of predefined feature representations such as SIFT. We introduce a deep scattering convolution network, with complex wavelet filters over spatial and angular variables. This representation brings an important improvement to results previously obtained with predefined features over object image databases such as Caltech and CIFAR. The resulting accuracy is comparable to results obtained with unsupervised deep learning and dictionary based representations. This shows that refining image representations by using geometric priors is a promising direction to improve image classification and its understanding.
@cite_29 introduce equivariance to @math -rotations and dihedral flips in CNNs by copying the transformed filters at different rotation--flip combinations. More recently they generalized this theory to all group-structured transformations in @cite_10 , but they only demonstrated applications on finite groups---an extension to continuous transformations would require a treatment on anti-aliasing and bandlimiting. @cite_22 use a larger number of rotations for texture classification and @cite_7 also use many rotated handcrafted filter copies, opting not to learn the filters. To achieve equivariance to a greater number of rotations, these methods would need an infinite amount of computation. H-Nets achieve equivariance to all rotations, but with finite computation.