Parametric Scattering Networks

Shanel Gauthier, Benjamin Thérien, Laurent Alsène-Racicot, Muawiz Chaudhary, Irina Rish, Eugene Belilovsky, Michael Eickenberg, Guy Wolf

Abstract: The wavelet scattering transform creates geometric in-variants and deformation stability. In multiple signal do-mains, it has been shown to yield more discriminative rep-resentations compared to other non-learned representations and to outperform learned representations in certain tasks, particularly on limited labeled data and highly structured signals. The wavelet filters used in the scattering trans-form are typically selected to create a tight frame via a pa-rameterized mother wavelet. In this work, we investigate whether this standard wavelet filterbank construction is op-timal. Focusing on Morlet wavelets, we propose to learn the scales, orientations, and aspect ratios of the filters to produce problem-specific parameterizations of the scattering transform. We show that our learned versions of the scattering transform yield significant performance gains in small-sample classification settings over the standard scat-tering transform. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that traditional filterbank constructions may not always be necessary for scattering transforms to extract effective rep-resentations.