Deep Convolution Neural Networks (DCNNs) are capable of learning
unprecedentedly effective image representations. However, their ability in
handling significant local and global image rotations remains limited. In this
paper, we propose Active Rotating Filters (ARFs) that actively rotate during
convolution and produce feature maps with location and orientation explicitly
encoded. An ARF acts as a virtual filter bank containing the filter itself and
its multiple unmaterialised rotated versions. During back-propagation, an ARF
is collectively updated using errors from all its rotated versions. DCNNs using
ARFs, referred to as Oriented Response Networks (ORNs), can produce
within-class rotation-invariant deep features while maintaining inter-class
discrimination for classification tasks. The oriented response produced by ORNs
can also be used for image and object orientation estimation tasks. Over
multiple state-of-the-art DCNN architectures, such as VGG, ResNet, and STN, we
consistently observe that replacing regular filters with the proposed ARFs
leads to significant reduction in the number of network parameters and
improvement in classification performance. We report the best results on
several commonly used benchmarks.

本文提出 Active Rotating Filters (ARFs)，它们可以主动旋转以产生具有位置和方向编码的特征图，用于深度学习中的图像识别，并在一系列基准测试中展现了显著的性能优势并得到了最好的结果。