As is known, methods and systems implemented in computer vision to process images, extracting hierarchical features from data, are not currently applicable with the same results in domains such as computer graphics, where 3D shapes (manifolds) need to be processed, or computational sociology, dealing with networks (graphs).
Deep learning methods have recently significantly impacted many domains. Nowadays, deep learning methods are already widely used in commercial applications, including Siri speech recognition in Apple iPhone, Google text translation, and Mobileye vision-based technology for autonomously driving cars.
Deep learning refers to learning complicated concepts by a machine, by means of building them out of simpler ones in a hierarchical or “multi-layer” manner. Artificial neural networks are a popular realization of such deep multi-layer hierarchies inspired by the signal processing done in the human brain. Though these methods have been known since the late 1960s, the computational power of modern computers, availability of large datasets, and efficient stochastic optimization methods have led to creating and effectively training complex network models that have made a qualitative breakthrough in performance.
Computer vision perhaps has been affected most dramatically by deep learning. Traditional approaches in this domain relied on “hand-crafted” axiomatic or empirical models. It appeared that constructing axiomatic models for increasingly complex concepts is nearly impossible, while at the same time, the growth of publicly available image data allowed “modeling by example”. Simply put, while it is hard to determine what makes a dog look like a dog, one can get millions examples of dog images and use a sufficiently complex generic model to learn the “dog model” from the data. The work of Krizhevsky et al., achieving unprecedented performance ImageNet benchmark in 2012, has provoked a sharp resurgence of interest in deep learning methods. Deep learning methods have been since applied to practically any problem in computer vision, almost invariably outperforming the previous approaches. Overall, this sequence of successes has brought on an overwhelming trend in the community to abandon “hand-crafted” models in favor of deep learning methods.
Among the key reasons for the success of deep neural networks are important assumptions on the statistical properties of the data, namely stationarity and compositionality through local statistics, which are present in natural images, video, and speech. From the geometric perspective, one can think of such signals as functions on the Euclidean space (plane), sampled on a grid. In this case, stationarity is owed to shift-invariance, locality is due to the local connectivity, and compositionality stems from the multi-resolution structure of the grid. These properties are exploited by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are built of alternating convolutional and downsampling (pooling) layers. The use of convolutions allows extracting local features that are shared across the image domain and greatly reduces the number of parameters in the network with respect to generic deep architectures, without sacrificing the expressive capacity of the network. The parameters of different layers are learned by minimizing some task-specific cost function.
Dealing with signals such as speech, images, or video on 1D-, 2D- and 3D Euclidean domains, respectively, has been the main focus of research in deep learning for the past decades. However, in recent years, more and more fields have had to deal with data residing on non-Euclidean geometric domains (referred to here as geometric data for brevity).
For instance, in social networks, the characteristics of users can be modeled as signals on the vertices of the social graph. In genetics, gene expression data are modeled as signals defined on the regulatory network. In computer graphics and vision, 3D shapes are modeled as Riemannian manifolds (surfaces) endowed with properties such as color texture or motion field (e.g. dynamic meshes). Even more complex examples include networks of operators, such as functional correspondences or difference operators in a collection of 3D shapes, or orientations of overlapping cameras in multi-view vision (“structure from motion”) problems. Furthermore, modeling high-dimensional data with graphs is an increasingly popular trend in general data science, where graphs are used to describe the low-dimensional intrinsic structure of the data.
On the one hand, the complexity of geometric data and availability of large datasets (in the case of social networks, on the order of billions of examples) make it tempting and very desirable to resort to machine learning techniques. On the other hand, the non-Euclidean nature of such data implies that there are no such familiar properties as global parametrization, common system of coordinates, vector space structure, or shift-invariance. Consequently, basic operations such as linear combination or convolution that are taken for granted in the Euclidean case, are even not well defined on non-Euclidean domains.
This happens to be a major obstacle that so far has precluded the use of successful deep learning methods such as convolutional or recurrent neural networks on non-Euclidean geometric data. As a result, the quantitative and qualitative breakthrough that deep learning methods have brought into speech recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision has not yet come to fields such as computer graphics or computational sociology. Given the great success of CNNs in computer vision, devising a non-Euclidean formulation of CNNs could lead to a breakthrough in many fields wherein data reside on non-Euclidean domains.
Many machine learning techniques successfully working on images were tried “as is” on 3D geometric data, represented for this purpose in some way “digestible” by standard frameworks. In particular, several prior art methods applied traditional Euclidean CNNs for shape classification, where the 3D geometric structure of the shapes was represented as a set of range images or a rasterized volume. The main drawback of such approaches is their treatment of geometric data as Euclidean structures. First, for complex 3D objects, Euclidean representations such as depth images or voxels may lose significant parts of the object or its fine details, or even break its topological structure. Second, Euclidean representations are not intrinsic, and vary due to pose or deformation of the object. Achieving invariance to shape deformations, a common requirement in many vision applications, is extremely hard with the aforementioned methods and requires huge training sets due to the large number of degrees of freedom involved in describing non-rigid deformations.
Referring to
For more abstract geometric data, such as graphs or networks, a Euclidean representation may not exist at all. One therefore has to generalize signal processing and learning methods to graphs, a research field generally referred to as signal processing on graphs.
Traditional signal processing has been developed primarily for linear shift-invariant (LSI) systems, which naturally arise when dealing with signals on Euclidean spaces. In this framework, which dates back to the first computers and is based on mathematics that is several centuries old, basic filtering operations can be represented as convolutions, linear shift-invariant operators. The fundamental property that convolution operators are diagonalized in the Fourier basis on Euclidean domains (colloquially known as the “Convolution Theorem”), together with fast numerical algorithms for Fourier transform computation (FFT), have been the main pillar of signal and image processing in the late part of the 20th century.
Spectral analysis techniques were extended to graphs considering the orthogonal eigenfunctions of the Laplacian operator as a generalization of the Fourier basis. Constructions such as wavelets, short-time Fourier transforms, or algorithms such as dictionary learning originally developed for the Euclidean domain, were also generalized to graphs.
Bruna et al. employed a spectral definition of “convolution”, where filters are defined by their Fourier coefficients in the graph Laplacian eigenbasis. In classical signal processing in Euclidean spaces, by virtue of the Convolution Theorem, the convolution of two functions can be computed in the frequency domain as a product of their respective Fourier transforms:
ƒ*g=−1(ƒ·g),
where , −1 denote the forward and inverse Fourier transforms, respectively, ƒ, g are some functions, and * denotes the convolution operation. On a graph, the convolution may be defined by the above formula, where the Fourier transform is understood as projection on the graph Laplacian eigenbasis. This method is designed to work on a single graph; a spectral model learned on one graph is in general not transferable to another one, since the filters are expressed with respect to a basis that is graph-specific (even for isometric graphs, the Laplacian eigenbases are defined up to sign).
Referring to
Generally speaking, this seems to be a common plight of most existing methods for signal processing and learning on graphs, which should be more appropriately referred to as “signal processing and learning on a graph”. While at a first glance this seems to be a subtle difference, for machine learning algorithms, the generalization ability is a key requirement.
The present invention deals with the problem of how to improve and successfully use deep learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks, on non-Euclidean geometric data, including coping with shape non-rigid and elastic deformations or transferring the CNN model learned on one graph to another graph, thus overcoming all the limitations currently affecting the prior art methods.
The solution at the base of the present invention is to adapt convolutional neural networks to general geometric domains, more particularly to non Euclidean domains, by using the intuition of convolution as “correlation with template”. According to this idea, the notion of a “patch” is applied to non-Euclidean geometric domains, i.e. to a continuous (topological) space that has a local (non-Euclidean) metric structure, for instance Riemannian manifolds and graphs.
In the light of this idea, the applicant has identified a specific method for extracting “patches” in the non-Euclidean geometric domains which is described herein. The method may be applied also to Euclidean domains, which constitute a particular case of non-Euclidean domains.
On the basis of this solution, the technical problem mentioned above is solved by a method for extracting hierarchical features from data defined on a geometric domain, comprising applying on said data at least an intrinsic convolution layer, including the steps of applying a patch operator to extract a local representation of the input data around a point on the geometric domain and outputting the correlation of a patch resulting from the extraction with a plurality of templates.
More advantageously, correlation with the local representation extracted at each points of the data defined on the non-Euclidean domain may be optimized depending on a task specific application or cost function, for instance optimizing certain parameters of the intrinsic convolution layer if a first task specific application or cost function on said data is required, such as shape retrieval, or optimizing certain other parameters of the intrinsic convolution layer if a second task specific application or cost function such as shape correspondence on said data is required.
Data are defined in the geometric domain X as functions, on which the patch operator is applied. The geometric domain may include, for example, a manifold, a parametric surface, an implicit surface, a mesh, a point cloud, and/or a graph. All these domains may be non-Euclidean domains.
Besides applying the patch operator, one or more optional layers can be applied to data, including:
and
The averaging operation may be an arithmetic average or a maximum operation or an average weighted by weights dependent on a distance between points or an average weighted by weights dependent on local volume elements.
According to an aspect of the invention, two or more layers are applied in sequence, and the output data of one layer in the sequence is given as input data to a subsequent layer in the sequence. Preferably, more than one of the layers is applied and the parameters of the applied layers are determined by minimizing the task specific application or cost function by means of an optimization procedure.
The patch operator inputs data on geometric domain and a point on said domain, and outputs the local representation of said data around the point. For instance, the local representation is:
Any one of such local representation is adapted to be applied to the intrinsic convolution layer to extract hierarchical features of data, also when such data are defined on a non-Euclidean domain, and the hierarchical features extracted may be optimized depending on the cost function.
In one aspect of the invention the patch operator outputs the local representation of input data in the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates, and an origin of angular coordinates of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates is provided as side information extracted from the geometric domain or the data.
More particularly, the geometric domain may be a surface and the side information used to determine the origin of the angular coordinate of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates at each point on the surface may be a principal curvature direction at said point.
The side information used to determine the origin of the angular coordinate of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates at each point may be, in alternative or in addition, a direction of a minimal or maximal absolute change of the data at said point.
Alternatively, the patch operator outputs the local representation of input data in the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates and a Fourier transform is applied with respect to angular coordinates, followed by an absolute value operation.
The application of the intrinsic convolution layer includes applying the patch operator to extract the local representation of input data in the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates around the point on the geometric (including non-Euclidean) domain, and outputting the correlation of the patch resulting from the extraction with a plurality of templates, wherein the computation of said correlation further comprises the steps of:
The patch operator may include the following features.
The representation of input data in the local polar system of coordinates around the point on the geometric domain further comprises the steps of:
According to an aspect of the present invention, the intrinsic distance is defined as one of the following distances or an approximation thereof:
The local representation of data in input to the intrinsic convolution layer may further comprise the steps of:
According to another aspect of the present invention, the intrinsic convolution layer may be based on a localized frequency analysis. In this case, the local representation of data may be given by a windowed Fourier transform. The windowed Fourier transform may be computed on the input data comprising the steps of:
In particular, the localized modulated atoms are heat kernels multiplied by Laplacian eigenfunctions. Advantageously, the heat kernels can be anisotropic.
According to a further aspect of the present invention, the computation of local representation of input data around the point on the geometric domain may comprise the steps of:
As explained above, the intrinsic convolution layer may be applied to optimize a cost function which may depend on an application. Accordingly, the method of the present invention is adapted to extract hierarchical features on data defined on a geometric domain and an optimization procedure is defined to optimize a cost function depending on the application for which hierarchical features are extracted, for instance extracting hierarchical features which better describe shape correspondence when the application concern matching a shape with another shape or extracting hierarchical features which better describe shape retrieval when the application is searching the most similar shape to the given one in a database.
A plurality of cost functions is defined, and each of the cost functions is associated to one or more application for which feature extraction is carried out. Advantageously, the intrinsic convolutional layer and the method of the present invention are not changed when the application changes, just the cost function adapted to the application is selected.
In an aspect of the invention, the input into the optimization procedure is a training set comprising:
According to the solution idea given above, the technical problem at the base of the present invention is also solved by a system for implementing the method for extracting hierarchical features. The system comprises:
Preferably, the system comprises means for further applying one or more of the following layers on the data:
The geometric domain wherein data is defined in the system can be one of the following:
Preferably, the means for applying layers are configured to apply more than one layer. The system includes an optimization procedure to minimize a cost function to determine parameters of the layers to be applied. The cost function may be selected based on an application for which the hierarchical features are extracted.
The patch operator is defined in the system as one or more of the following:
The patch operator is configured to output the local representation of input data in the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates, and to provide an origin of angular coordinates of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates as side information extracted from the geometric domain or the data.
The system may be configured to take a surface as a geometric domain and to a take a principle curvature direction at the point as the side information used to determine the origin of the angular coordinate of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates at each point on the surface.
The system may be configured to take a direction of a minimal or maximal absolute change of the data at the point as the side information used to determine the origin of the angular coordinate of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates at each point.
The patch operator may be configured to output the local representation of input data in the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates, and to apply the Fourier transform with respect to angular coordinates, followed by an absolute value operation.
The means to apply the intrinsic convolution layer are configured to apply the patch operator to extract a local representation of input data in a local intrinsic polar system of coordinates around a point on the geometric domain, and to output the correlation of a patch resulting from the extraction with a plurality of templates, and are further configured for
The means to apply the intrinsic convolution layer are further configured for:
The intrinsic distance is one of the following or an approximation thereof:
The means to apply the intrinsic convolution layer are further configured for
The means to apply the intrinsic convolution layer are further configured for computing the windowed Fourier transform of input data by:
The localized modulated atoms are isotropic or anisotropic heat kernels multiplied by Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions.
The means to apply the intrinsic convolution layer are further configured for the computation of local representation of input data around a point on geometric domain by
According to an aspect of the invention, the averaging operation is one or more of the following:
Advantageously, a plurality of cost functions may be optimized by the system, and each cost functions is associated with one or more application for which features may be extracted.
According to the optimization procedure, the system may take in input a training set, comprising:
Advantageously, the system may be used for different applications including determining similarity between two geometric objects or determining correspondence between objects from a class of geometric objects and a reference object.
Further features and advantages of the method and system of the present invention are given in the following description, with reference to the annexed drawings for exemplary purposes and without limiting the scope of protection of the present invention.
According to the idea of solutions given above, methods are hereafter described for extracting hierarchical features from data defined on a geometric domain using an intrinsic convolutional neural network endowed with, at least, one intrinsic convolution layer, according to the present invention. The methods are described with reference to the annexed drawings, provided for exemplary purposes only and without limiting the scope of the present invention.
The intrinsic convolution layer of the method of the present invention differs from the convolution layer of related art convolutional neural networks by the kind of domains onto which it is applicable. In particular, the convolution layer of related art neural networks is restricted to domains that can be modeled as Euclidean spaces (images, audio signals, etc.). Advantageously, the intrinsic convolution layer of the method of the present invention is adapted to deal with a wider category of domains that can be modeled as non-Euclidean spaces.
Advantageously, the methods of the subject invention work at an intrinsic level: the patch operator according to the present invention is defined on the geometric domain itself, as opposed to related art methods using a Euclidean representation (embedding) of non-Euclidean domains. For instance,
Hereafter, definitions of geometric domain, data defined on the geometric domain, patch operator, correlation with templates and intrinsic convolutional neural network according to the methods of the present invention are given.
A geometric domain is a non-Euclidean space. Therefore, the meaning of the two expressions in the following description is the same. Geometric domains include, but are not limited to, manifolds and graphs.
An m-dimensional manifold X is a topological space that is locally homeomorphic (topologically equivalent) to a m-dimensional Euclidean space, referred to as the tangent space. For example, the Earth (spherical surface) is locally equivalent to a plane. Additionally, the manifold X can be endowed with an inner product on the tangent space (referred to as Riemannian metric gX), which provides for a way to measure intrinsic distances on the manifold. In this case X is referred to as a Riemannian manifold.
What is commonly known as “three-dimensional (3D) shapes” in computer graphics and vision can be modeled as two-dimensional (2D) manifolds (surfaces), embedded in the 3D Euclidean space. The term 2D in this case refers to the intrinsic dimensionality of the manifold, and 3D to the (extrinsic) dimensionality of the embedding space.
More generally, an M-dimensional manifold embedded in a D-dimensional Euclidean space (D>M) can be represented through a parametrization y=ƒ(x1, . . . , xM), ƒ:Ω⊂M→D, where Ω represents the parameter space. In the case when M=2, the manifold is referred to as a parametric surface.
Another way of representing an M-dimensional manifold is in the implicit form as the M-dimensional level set of a function ƒ(x1, . . . , xD)=0. For example, a 2-dimensional manifold (surface) is represented by a function defined on the 3D Euclidean space. Often, ƒ is chosen as the distance from the manifold.
The previous models are ordered in terms of generality.
According to the present invention, the geometric domains defined in terms of one of the previous formulas are associated to a discrete approximation.
For instance, the manifold X can be associated to a discrete approximation X by sampling N points x1, . . . , xNεX. The discrete approximation can be represented in different ways, including:
Graphs, instead, can be modeled as the pair (V,E), where V={1, . . . , N} is a set of N vertices or nodes, and Eε{1, . . . , N}×{1, . . . , N} is the set of edges connecting the vertices. The main difference with the previous models resides in the fact that a graph is a purely topological notion, therefore the vertices are not associated with any coordinate in 3.
According to the present invention, given the geometric domain X, data on X are defined in terms of functions ƒ: X→Q, where Q represents the dimensionality of the data. When the geometric domain X is approximated with one of the previous discrete approximation X, then data can be defined in terms of maps f:V→Q, where V are the vertices of the discretization X. If Q=1, than f is the N-dimensional vector f=(ƒ(x1), . . . , ƒ(xN))T, where •T is the transposition operator.
The steps of the method of the present invention are executed on data defined on the discrete approximation X of the geometric domain X.
Examples of such functions for defining data are:
Data on the geometric domain X may be defined also through spectral properties of the Laplace-Beltrami operator ΔX ƒ=−divX(∇Xƒ), a generalization of the classical Laplacian to non-Euclidean spaces.
The Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) is intrinsic, i.e. it does not depend on the embedding of the manifold. As a result, it is invariant to isometric (metric preserving) deformations of the manifold. If, for instance, the manifold X represent a human body, then the LBO and all the derived quantities are invariant to, e.g., pose changes (different positions of arms, legs, . . . ).
On a compact manifold, the LBO admits an eigendecomposition ΔXφk=Λkφk with real eigenvalues {0=λ1≧λ2≦ . . . }. The eigenvalues set {λk}k≧1 is also known as the spectrum of the LBO. The corresponding eigenfunctions {φk}k≧1, form an orthonormal basis on L2(X), which is a generalization of the Fourier basis to non-Euclidean domains.
Any function ƒεL2(X) can be represented as the Fourier series ƒ(x)=Σk≧1ƒ,φkL
The generalized convolution of ƒ,gεL2(X) can be defined by analogy to the classical case as the inverse transform of the product of forward transforms, (ƒ*g)(x)=Σk≧1{circumflex over (ƒ)}kĝkφk(X) and is, in general, non shift-invariant.
The LBO can be used to describe physical processes on geometric domains. For instance, the heat diffusion on a geometric domain X can be described in the simplest setting through the isotropic heat equation:
where ƒ(x,t) denotes the amount of heat at point x and time t and ƒ0(x) is the initial heat distribution. The solution of the previous equation is obtained as ƒ(x,t)=ht(x,x′)*ƒ0(x), where ht(x,x′) is the heat kernel. In the spectral domain the heat kernel is expressed as ht(x,x′)=Σk≧1e−tλ
The isotropic heat equation assumes that the heat conduction properties of the manifold are constant at every point. A more general diffusion equation has the form ƒt(x,t)=divX(D(x)∇Xƒ(x,t)), where D(x) is the thermal conductivity tensor (in the discrete settings, the operator D(x) can be represented as the 2×2 matrix D) applied to the gradient in the tangent plane. The thermal conductivity tensor allows modeling heat flow that is position- and direction-dependent; the diffusion equation in this case is called anisotropic.
The eigendecomposition and the heat kernel associated with the anisotropic LBO
On a discrete approximation X of the geometric domain, the LBO ΔX can be defined as an N×N matrix L=A−1W, where
where αij,βij denotes the angles ∠ikj,φihj of the triangles sharing the edge ij, and A=diag(a1, . . . , aN) with ai=⅓Σjk:ijkεFAijk being the local area element at vertex i and Aijk denoting the area of the triangle ijk.
The first K≦N eigenvectors and eigenvalues of L are computed by performing the generalized eigendecomposition WΦ=AΦΛ, where Φ=(φ1, . . . , φK) is an N×K matrix containing as columns the discretized eigenfunctions and Λ=diag(λ1, . . . , λK) is the diagonal matrix of the corresponding eigenvalues.
Through the eigendecomposition of the LBO it is possible to define meaningful features f:V→Q that can be considered input data for the method of the present invention. For instance, global point signature is defined as f(x)=(λ1−1/2φ1(x), . . . , λQ−1/2φQ(x)).
Other spectral shape descriptors take a generic form of the diagonal of a parametric kernel diagonalized by the LBO eigenbasis. More specifically, at each point a descriptor may be constructed as
f(x)=Σk≧1τ(λk)φk2(x),
where τ(λ)=(τ1(λ), . . . , τQ(λ)) represents a bank of transfer functions. By changing the transfer functions τ(Δ) different shape properties are described or emphasized.
Relevant examples include:
According to the present invention, the convolution layer is applied to geometric domains by following the interpretation of convolution as “correlation with a template”. This convolution layer is referred to as intrinsic convolution layer to avoid ambiguities with related art convolution layers, which are limited to be applied on Euclidean domains only and are not invariant to non-rigid deformations.
The intrinsic convolution layer comprises the steps of:
According to an aspect of the present invention, the patch operator may be defined in different ways. In particular, in the following description, three different patch operators are defined through which, respectively:
The patch operator takes in input data on the geometric domain and a point on said domain, and outputs the local representation of said input data around said point, wherein the local representation, depending on the operator used, is data represented in a local intrinsic polar system of coordinates, data transformed by a windowed Fourier transform, or data weighted by anisotropic diffusion kernels.
Advantageously, the patch operator to be used is selected depending on the kind of geometric domain on which data are defined. For instance, the construction of a patch as a local polar system of coordinates is limited to meshes only.
Moreover, depending on which patch operator is used, the step of correlating with a template is adapted. In the following, details of each of the three patch operators and how to correlate the extracted patches with a template are described.
According to one aspect of the proposed invention, the patch operator computes a local representation of the data ƒ around each input vertex of the geometric domain by interpolating the data ƒ on a local polar system of coordinates previously extracted. In more detail, given a point xεX, such patch operator is constructed following two steps:
The construction of a local polar system of coordinates includes the following steps:
is the Green's function of the biharmonic operator Δ2. When represented in terms of eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the LBO, the biharmonic distance formula differs from the commute time distance one only slightly:
The previous steps are repeated for all the points of the geometric domain X In particular,
Given the angular and radial coordinates, the interpolation weights Π(x)ƒ can be defined as:
and wρ(x,x′), wθ(x,x′) are the radial and angular interpolation weights, respectively.
For instance, the radial interpolation weights can be defined as a Gaussian wρ(x,x′)∝e−(d
The angular interpolation weights can be defined as a Gaussian wθ(x,x′)∝e−d
If the geometric domain is approximated with a (manifold triangular) mesh, the local system of coordinates previously described is sampled at Nθ angular and Nρ radial bins, obtaining in this way a discrete local system of coordinates. In more detail, with reference to
As a consequence, the patch operator Π can be represented in the discrete domain as a NθNρN×N matrix Π applied to the data f on the mesh and producing the patches at each vertex. Conveniently, the matrix Π is very sparse since the values of the function at a few nearby vertices only contribute to each local polar bin.
Once the patch operator Π(x)ƒ is computed, the convolution of ƒεL2(X) with a template a(ρ,θ) is computed as (ƒ*a)(x)=Σθ,ra(θ+Δθ,r)(Π(x)ƒ)(r,θ), where a(ρ,θ) is a template (or filter) applied on the patch (i.e. expressed in the same local representation than the data ƒ). Due to angular coordinate ambiguity, the filter can be rotated by arbitrary angle Δθ.
In order to deal with the angular ambiguity, the method of the present invention may consider as side information to determine the origin of the angular coordinate of the local intrinsic polar system of coordinates, one of the following:
According to another aspect of the present invention, if no side information is available, it is known that the angular ambiguity can be removed by first applying the Fourier transform with respect to the angular coordinate and then taking the absolute value, i.e. |Σθ e−iωθ(Π(x)ƒ(x))(ρ,θ)|. The Fourier transform translates rotational ambiguity into complex phase ambiguity, which is removed by the absolute value.
A further aspect of the method removes angular ambiguity by means of an angular max pooling procedure including the steps of:
On the basis of the idea that convolution in the spatial domain corresponds to a multiplication in the frequency domain, the method of the present invention defines the intrinsic convolution layer by applying a vertex-frequency analysis or a windowed Fourier transform (WFT) to the input data.
The computation of the patch operator using the WFT requires two steps:
In the Euclidean domain, classical WFT analyzes the frequency content of a signal that is localized by means of a window. Given a function ƒεL2(), and a window g localized at zero, the WFT is computed as (Sƒ)x,ω=∫ƒ(x′)g(x−x′)e−ix′ωdx′. WFT can also be represented as an inner product with a translated and modulated window, (Sƒ)x,ω=ƒ,MωTxgL
The method of the present invention extends the notion of WFT to geometric domains by defining translation operator as (Tx′ƒ)(x)=Σk≧1{circumflex over (ƒ)}kφk(x′)φk(x) and by defining the modulation operators as (Mkƒ)(x)=φk(x)ƒ(x), where {circumflex over (ƒ)} is the Fourier transform of the input data ƒ and {φk}k≧1 can be the isotropic LBO eigenfunctions or the anisotropic LBO eigenfunctions.
Combining the two operators together, a modulated and translated window MωTxg, called atom can be obtained. Accordingly, on geometric domains (Sƒ)x,ω=ƒ,MωTxgL
If a discrete approximation of the geometric domain is provided, the WFT can be computed as Sf=(fω)TAΦ(ĝΦT), where ĝ is the K-dimensional vector representing the window in the frequency domain, f is the N-dimensional vector representing the input function, and (aB)ij=aiBij denotes the known Hadamard product, i.e. element-wise multiplication of a vector and a matrix, replicating the vector along the second dimension of the matrix. The resulting WFT is a matrix of size K×N.
If the patch operator is provided by means of WFT, the correlation with a template a reduces to a simple multiplication, i.e. (ƒ*a)(x)=Σp=1PΣk=1Kaqpk|(Sƒp)x,k|, q=1, . . . , Q, where p=1, . . . , P represent the dimension of the input function and the absolute value is considered to reduce the effect of the LBO eigenfunctions sign ambiguities.
Advantageously, according to the subject invention, the Fourier transform of the window ĝ can not only be a fixed filter, but can also be parameterized in some fixed interpolation basis in the frequency domain (e.g. the B-spline basis β={β1, . . . , βQ} on the LBO spectrum), (λ)=Σm=1Mbpmβm(λ), p=1, . . . , P, where the P×M matrix (bpm) of learnable weights defines the windows.
According to another embodiment of the present invention, the patch operator can be defined through anisotropic heat kernels. In this setting, the main idea is to build a local representation of the given data ƒ around the point x by averaging a variety of anisotropic heat kernels at different directions. Such kernels capture local directional structures similarly to the local polar system of coordinates previously described.
The construction of such local kernels requires two steps:
For instance, Dα(x) can be defined as
where
and km(x),kM(x) are the minimum and maximum curvature, respectively. In this situation, Dα(x) drives the diffusion in the direction of the maximum curvature kM(x).
This approach offers various advantages over the local polar coordinate system, including:
If the geometric domain is approximated with a triangular mesh X, the anisotropic LBO is defined as
where êkj,êkiH=êkjTHêkj,
and Uijk=(ûM,û,{circumflex over (n)}) is an orthonormal reference frame attached to each triangle ijkεF. The shear matrix H encodes the anisotropic scaling operated by Dα up to an orthogonal basis change. If Dα=I,êkj,êkiH=cos αij and the isotropic LBO discretization is obtained.
In order to allow arbitrary direction, the basis vectors Uijk is rotated on each triangle around the respective normal {circumflex over (n)} by the angle θ, equal for all triangles. Denoting as Rθ the corresponding 3×3 rotation matrix, this is equivalent to modifying the H-weighted inner product with the directed shear matrix Hθ=RθHRθT. The resulting weights wij are thus obtained by using the inner products êkj,êkiH=êkjTHθêkj.
If the geometric domain is approximated with a point cloud instead, the procedure follows the following steps:
Once this local mesh triangulation is provided, the previous formulas still hold.
Following the same construction of known convolutional neural networks, the proposed method combines other known layers with the intrinsic convolution layer either to achieve better performance or to adapt the presented method to the desired application.
In particular, the proposed method includes several layers that can be applied subsequently, such that the output of the previous layer is used as input into the subsequent one to form a hierarchy of transformations. Other known layers include:
computing an averaging operation on input data over the neighbors for all the points on said subset.
Averaging operations include the known
and the novel
Each of the previous layers has input data and output data, and the output data of one layer in the sequence can be given as input to any subsequent layer, or layers, in the sequence. The present invention does not impose any constraint on the composition of said layers, including any limit on the order or the number of layers to consider.
Such sequence of customized layers can be thought of as a non-linear hierarchical parametric function ψΘ(F), where F=(f(x1), . . . , f(xN)) is a P×N matrix of input features at all the points of the geometric domain, and Θ denotes the parameters of all the layers, and ψΘ(F)=ψN∘ψN−1∘ . . . ∘ψ0(F), where ψi indicates one of the aforementioned layers.
Advantageously, depending on the application in mind, the present invention allows to learn these parameters by minimizing some task specific cost function. The present invention allows learning of the parameters Θ, i.e. intrinsic convolution templates, b-spline interpolation weights, linear combination weights, etc.
The applications that the proposed invention can deal with, include but are not necessarily limited to:
For this purpose, the present invention considers a siamese network configuration, composed of two identical copies of the same intrinsic convolutional neural network model sharing the same parameterization and fed by pairs of knowingly similar or dissimilar samples, and minimize a cost function such as, l(Θ)=(1−γ)Σi=1|T
Other examples of cost functions do not rely on the siamese network construction, therefore they can be minimized by only one intrinsic convolutional neural network. Example of such cost functions are:
In some embodiments, the methods and processes described herein can be embodied as code and/or data. The software code and data described herein can be stored on one or more machine-readable media (e.g., computer-readable media), which may include any device or medium that can store code and/or data for use by a computer system. When a computer system reads and executes the code and/or data stored on a computer-readable medium, the computer system performs the methods and processes embodied as data structures and code stored within the computer-readable storage medium.
It should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that machine-readable media (e.g., computer-readable media) include removable and non-removable structures/devices that can be used for storage of information, such as computer-readable instructions, data structures, program modules, and other data used by a computing system/environment. A computer-readable medium includes, but is not limited to, volatile memory such as random access memories (RAM, DRAM, SRAM); and non-volatile memory such as flash memory, various read-only-memories (ROM, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM), magnetic and ferromagnetic/ferroelectric memories (MRAM, FeRAM), and magnetic and optical storage devices (hard drives, magnetic tape, CDs, DVDs); network devices; or other media now known or later developed that is capable of storing computer-readable information/data. Computer-readable media should not be construed or interpreted to include any propagating signals. A computer-readable medium that can be used with embodiments of the subject invention can be, for example, a compact disc (CD), digital video disc (DVD), flash memory device, volatile memory, or a hard disk drive (HDD), such as an external HDD or the HDD of a computing device, though embodiments are not limited thereto. A computing device can be, for example, a laptop computer, desktop computer, server, cell phone, or tablet, though embodiments are not limited thereto.
In some embodiments, one or more (or all) of the steps performed in any of the methods of the subject invention can be performed by one or more processors (e.g., one or more computer processors). For example, any or all of the means for applying an intrinsic convolution layer, the means for applying one or more layers as described herein, the means for determining similarity between two geometric objects, and the means for determining correspondence between objects from a class of geometric objects and a reference object can include or be a processor (e.g., a computer processor) or other computing device.
It should be understood that the examples and embodiments described herein are for illustrative purposes only and that various modifications or changes in light thereof will be suggested to persons skilled in the art and are to be included within the spirit and purview of this application.
All patents, patent applications, provisional applications, and publications referred to or cited herein are incorporated by reference in their entirety, including all figures and tables, to the extent they are not inconsistent with the explicit teachings of this specification.