Image Classification using Sequence of Pixels

TL;DR

This paper investigates how feature construction using Ramanujan periodic transform improves the training efficiency and accuracy of LSTM and BiLSTM networks in sequential image classification tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a simple feature construction method that significantly enhances training accuracy and reduces training time for LSTM-based image classifiers.

Findings

Feature construction increases training accuracy from 33% to 90%.

Training time is reduced by one-third with constructed features.

LSTM and BiLSTM perform better with engineered features than raw sequences.

Abstract

This study compares sequential image classification methods based on recurrent neural networks. We describe methods based on recurrent neural networks such as Long-Short-Term memory(LSTM), bidirectional Long-Short-Term memory(BiLSTM) architectures, etc. We also review the state-of-the-art sequential image classification architectures. We mainly focus on LSTM, BiLSTM, temporal convolution network, and independent recurrent neural network architecture in the study. It is known that RNN lacks in learning long-term dependencies in the input sequence. We use a simple feature construction method using orthogonal Ramanujan periodic transform on the input sequence. Experiments demonstrate that if these features are given to LSTM or BiLSTM networks, the performance increases drastically. Our focus in this study is to increase the training accuracy simultaneously reducing the training time for the LSTM and BiLSTM architecture, but not on pushing the state-of-the-art results, so we use simple LSTM/BiLSTM architecture. We compare sequential input with the constructed feature as input to single layer LSTM and BiLSTM network for MNIST and CIFAR datasets. We observe that sequential input to the LSTM network with 128 hidden unit training for five epochs results in training accuracy of 33% whereas constructed features as input to the same LSTM network results in training accuracy of 90% with 1/3 lesser time.