DTCWT-PCA
Amarjot Singh
Signal Processing Group, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, U.K.
ABSTRACT
In this paper we introduce an unsupervised deep network
that uses a parametric log transformation with Dual-Tree
complex weights followed by two stages of PCA layers. The
network is used for extracting succint translational invari-
ant representations of multi-resolutional images for image
segmentation and classification tasks. The parametric trans-
formation aids the OLS pruning algorithm by converting the
skewed distributions into relatively mean-symmetric distri-
butions while the Dual-Tree wavelets improve the compu-
tational efficiency of the network. The stacked PCA layers
help in extracting the top-most eigenvectors of the features,
thus retaining maximum invariance and providing concise
representations in an unsupervised setting. The proposed net-
work has been tested on benchmark datasets of varying sizes,
providing enhanced performance on limited datasets with few
training instances.
Index Terms— DTCWT, Scattering network, Convolu-
tional neural network, PCA, unsupervised, CIFAR.
1. INTRODUCTION
The task of identifying and classifying objects in an image is
considered as a difficult problem. This is due to the presence
of translation, rotation and scale variability of objects within
the image and external variabilities such as noise and illumi-
nation. Initially, hand-engineered features such as SIFT [?]
and HOG [?] which modeled the geometric properties of the
objects were used for the classification. But later, they got re-
placed by trained neural networks [?], [?], [?], especially,
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) [?] . CNNs were
able to achieve state-of-the art results by learning discrimina-
tive class-specific image representations which included the
variability of the objects mentioned above. However, given
the overwhelming complexity of these networks and amount
of trainable parameters, design of optimal configurations is
still a difficult task.
ScatterNets, as shown by Mallat [?], [?], [?], [?], incorpo-
rate the geometric knowledge of images to produce discrim-
inative and translational, rotational invariant representations.
In this network, the images are first filtered with multi-scale
and multi-directional complex Morlet wavelets. This provides
the invariant features which is followed by point-wise nonlin-
earity and local smoothing. Since, the high frequencies are
lost due to smooting, cascaded wavelet transformations are
used in later layers to recover them. This justifies the need
of a multi-layered network. To de-correlate the multiplicative
low-frequency components from the concatenated invariant
features, a log transformation may be applied at all layers [?].
After this, orthogonal least squares (OLS) selects the subset
of object class-specific dimensions across the training data,
similar to that of the fully connected layers in CNNs [?]. To
suppress the effect of outliers, whose presence may hinder
least square parameter estimations due to unwanted features
extracted from background clutter, noise and illumination, ap-
proximate symmetry is introduced. Overall, ScatterNets have
been shown to provide results which are comparable to deep
neural networks like CNNs.
Amarjot et.al. [] previously proposed an improved Scat-
terNet that used dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DTCWT) [?]
parametric log transformation layers and OLS layer to ex-
tract relatively symmetric translation invariant representa-
tions from a multi-resolution image. In this paper, we further
improve this model by introducing multi-staged PCA lay-
ers. These PCA layers provide a linear transformation to the
features and help reduce the dimensionality while retaining
the main variance of the representations. The transformed
features are finally used by a Gaussian-kernel support vec-
tor machine (G-SVM) to perform object classification and
segmentation on the following datasets - PASCAL Object
Recognition Database, Caltech 101, Spine Image segmenta-
tion [], CIFAR-10.
The contributions of the paper are as follows:
• Filter Bank: Dual-tree wavelets are used as opposed to
Morlet wavelets. The DT-wavelets have discrete form,
short support, perfect reconstruction, and limited re-
dundancy, thus providing similar rich features to Morlet
wavelets
• Multilayer PCA-net: The two stacked layers of PCA
which essentially amount to a linear transformation of
the previous features help to capture invariance in the
data thus providing concise and richer semantic infor-
mation of the images. This transformation has the ad-
vantage of being unsupervised and is shown to perform
efficiently in datasets of significantly smaller sizes.
• Unsupervised architecture: The proposed model func-
tions in an unsupervised fashion. This gives great lever-
age to operate on abundant unlabelled data for numer-
 ous tasks like image segmentation and classification.
The paper is divided into the following sections: