A residual-networks family with hundreds or even thousands of layers dominates major image recognition tasks, but building a network by simply stacking residual blocks inevitably limits its optimization ability. This paper proposes a novel residual-network architecture, Residual networks of Residual networks (RoR), to dig the optimization ability of residual networks. RoR substitutes optimizing residual mapping of residual mapping for optimizing original residual mapping. In particular, RoR adds level-wise shortcut connections upon original residual networks to promote the learning capability of residual networks. More importantly, RoR can be applied to various kinds of residual networks (ResNets, Pre-ResNets and WRN) and significantly boost their performance. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of RoR, where it achieves the best performance in all residual-network-like structures. Our RoR-3-WRN58-4+SD models achieve new state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN, with test errors 3.77%, 19.73% and 1.59%, respectively. RoR-3 models also achieve state-of-the-art results compared to ResNets on ImageNet data set.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 201

Automatically predicting age group and gender from face images acquired in unconstrained conditions is an important and challenging task in many real-world applications. Nevertheless, the conventional methods with manually-designed features on in-the-wild benchmarks are unsatisfactory because of incompetency to tackle large variations in unconstrained images. This difficulty is alleviated to some degree through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for its powerful feature representation. In this paper, we propose a new CNN based method for age group and gender estimation leveraging Residual Networks of Residual Networks (RoR), which exhibits better optimization ability for age group and gender classification than other CNN architectures. Moreover, two modest mechanisms based on observation of the characteristics of age group are presented to further improve the performance of age estimation. In order to further improve the performance and alleviate overfitting problem, RoR model is pre-trained on ImageNet firstly, and then it is fune-tuned on the IMDB-WIKI-101 data set for further learning the features of face images, finally, it is used to fine-tune on Adience data set. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of RoR method for age and gender estimation in the wild, where it achieves better performance than other CNN methods. Finally, the RoR-152+IMDB-WIKI-101 with two mechanisms achieves new state-of-the-art results on Adience benchmark.

Abstract:The Residual Networks of Residual Networks (RoR) exhibits excellent performance in the image classification task, but sharply increasing the number of feature map channels makes the characteristic information transmission incoherent, which losses a certain of information related to classification prediction, limiting the classification performance. In this paper, a Pyramidal RoR network model is proposed by analysing the performance characteristics of RoR and combining with the PyramidNet. Firstly, based on RoR, the Pyramidal RoR network model with channels gradually increasing is designed. Secondly, we analysed the effect of different residual block structures on performance, and chosen the residual block structure which best favoured the classification performance. Finally, we add an important principle to further optimize Pyramidal RoR networks, drop-path is used to avoid over-fitting and save training time. In this paper, image classification experiments were performed on CIFAR-10/100 and SVHN datasets, and we achieved the current lowest classification error rates were 2.96%, 16.40% and 1.59%, respectively. Experiments show that the Pyramidal RoR network optimization method can improve the network performance for different data sets and effectively suppress the gradient disappearance problem in DCNN training.

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