Obtaining Better Image Representations by Combining Complementary Activation Features of Multiple ConvNet Layers for Transfer Learning

Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are powerful models that learn hierarchies of visual features, which could also be used to obtain image representations for transfer learning. The basic pipeline for transfer learning is to first train a ConvNet on a large dataset (source task) and then use feed-forward units activation of the trained ConvNet as image representation for smaller datasets (target task). Our key contribution is to demonstrate superior performance of multiple ConvNet layer features over single ConvNet layer features. Combining multiple ConvNet layer features will result in more complex feature space with some features being repetitive. This requires some form of feature selection. We use AdaBoost with single stumps to implicitly select only distinct features that are useful towards classification from concatenated ConvNet features. Experimental results show that using multiple ConvNet layer activation features instead of single ConvNet layer features consistently will produce superior performance. Improvements becomes significant as we increase the distance between source task and the target task.