Abstract

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently shown outstanding image classifification performance in the largescale visual recognition challenge (ILSVRC2012). The success of CNNs is attributed to their ability to learn rich midlevel image representations as opposed to hand-designed low-level features used in other image classifification methods. Learning CNNs, however, amounts to estimating millions of parameters and requires a very large number of annotated image samples. This property currently prevents application of CNNs to problems with limited training data. In this work we show how image representations learned with CNNs on large-scale annotated datasets can be effifi- ciently transferred to other visual recognition tasks with limited amount of training data. We design a method to reuse layers trained on the ImageNet dataset to compute mid-level image representation for images in the PASCAL VOC dataset. We show that despite differences in image statistics and tasks in the two datasets, the transferred representation leads to signifificantly improved results for object and action classifification, outperforming the current state of the art on Pascal VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets. We also show promising results for object and action localization