Learning and understanding visual representations

Learnable representations, and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in particular, have become the preferred way of extracting visual features for image understanding tasks, from object recognition to semantic segmentation. In this talk I will discuss several recent advances in deep representations for computer vision. After reviewing modern CNN architectures, I will give an example of a state-of-the-art network in text spotting; in particular, I will show that, by using only synthetic data and a sufficiently large deep model, it is possible directly map image regions to English words, a classification problem with 90K classes, obtaining in this manner state-of-the-art performance in text spotting. I will also briefly touch on other applications of deep learning to object recognition and discuss feature universality and transfer learning. In the last part of the talk I will move to the problem of understanding deep networks, which remain largely black boxes, presenting two possible approaches to their analysis. The first one are visualisation techniques that can investigate the information retained and learned by a visual representation. The second one is a method that allows exploring how representation capture geometric notions such as image transformations, and to find whether different representations are related and how.