Semantic Segmentation : Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Sparse dictionaries

Abstract: The two main bottlenecks using deep neural networks are data dependency and training time. This thesis proposes a novel method for weight initialization of the convolutional layers in a convolutional neural network. This thesis introduces the usage of sparse dictionaries. A sparse dictionary optimized on domain specific data can be seen as a set of intelligent feature extracting filters. This thesis investigates the effect of using such filters as kernels in the convolutional layers in the neural network. How do they affect the training time and final performance? The dataset used here is the Cityscapes-dataset which is a library of 25000 labeled road scene images.The sparse dictionary was acquired using the K-SVD method. The filters were added to two different networks whose performance was tested individually. One of the architectures is much deeper than the other. The results have been presented for both networks. The results show that filter initialization is an important aspect which should be taken into consideration while training the deep networks for semantic segmentation.