Generalized Operational Classifiers for Material Identification

Material is one of the intrinsic features of objects, and consequently material recognition plays an important role in image understanding. The same material may have various shapes and appearance, while keeping the same physical characteristic. This brings great challenges for material recognition. Besides suitable features, a powerful classifier also can improve the overall recognition performance. Due to the limitations of classical linear neurons, used in all shallow and deep neural networks, such as CNN, we propose to apply the generalized operational neurons to construct a classifier adaptively. These generalized operational perceptrons (GOP) contain a set of linear and nonlinear neurons, and possess a structure that can be built progressively. This makes GOP classifier more compact and can easily discriminate complex classes. The experiments demonstrate that GOP networks trained on a small portion of the data (4%) can achieve comparable performances to state-of-the-arts models trained on much larger portions of the dataset.