Convolutional Networks and Applications in Vision

Intelligent tasks, such as visual perception, auditory perception, and language understanding require the construction of good internal representations of the world (or "features")? which must be invariant to irrelevant variations of the input while, preserving relevant information. A major question for Machine Learning is how to learn such good features automatically. Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are a biologically-inspired trainable architecture that can learn invariant features. Each stage in a ConvNets is composed of a filter bank, some nonlinearities, and feature pooling layers. With multiple stages, a ConvNet can learn multi-level hierarchies of features. While ConvNets have been successfully deployed in many commercial applications from OCR to video surveillance, they require large amounts of labeled training samples. We describe new unsupervised learning algorithms, and new non-linear stages that allow ConvNets to be trained with very few labeled samples. Applications to visual object recognition and vision navigation for off-road mobile robots are described.