On the Construction and Evaluation of Color Invariant Networks

Konrad Groh

Abstract: This is an empirical paper which constructs color invariant networks and evaluates their performances on a realistic data set. The paper studies the simplest possible case of color invariance: invariance under pixel-wise permutation of the color channels. Thus the network is aware not of the specific color object, but its colorfulness. The data set introduced in the paper consists of images showing crashed cars from which ten classes were extracted. An additional annotation was done which labeled whether the car shown was red or non-red. The networks were evaluated by their performance on the classification task. With the color annotation we altered the color ratios in the training data and analyzed the generalization capabilities of the networks on the unaltered test data. We further split the test data in red and non-red cars and did a similar evaluation. It is shown in the paper that an pixel-wise ordering of the rgb-values of the images performs better or at least similarly for small deviations from the true color ratios. The limits of these networks are also discussed.

TL;DR: We construct and evaluate color invariant neural nets on a novel realistic data set

Keywords: deep learning, invariance, data set, evaluation

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10)