Stacked Convolutional Sparse Auto-Encoders for Representation Learning

Abstract

Deep learning seeks to achieve excellent performance for representation learning in image datasets. However, supervised deep learning models such as convolutional neural networks require a large number of labeled image data, which is intractable in applications, while unsupervised deep learning models like stacked denoising auto-encoder cannot employ label information. Meanwhile, the redundancy of image data incurs performance degradation on representation learning for aforementioned models. To address these problems, we propose a semi-supervised deep learning framework called stacked convolutional sparse auto-encoder, which can learn robust and sparse representations from image data with fewer labeled data records. More specifically, the framework is constructed by stacking layers. In each layer, higher layer feature representations are generated by features of lower layers in a convolutional way with kernels learned by a sparse auto-encoder. Meanwhile, to solve the data redundance problem, the algorithm of Reconstruction Independent Component Analysis is designed to train on patches for sphering the input data. The label information is encoded using a Softmax Regression model for semi-supervised learning. With this framework, higher level representations are learned by layers mapping from image data. It can boost the performance of the base subsequent classifiers such as support vector machines. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior classification performance of our framework compared to several state-of-the-art representation learning methods.