Gestalt descriptions for deep image understanding

In this work, we present a novel visual perception-inspired local description approach as a preprocessing step for deep learning. With the ongoing growth of visual data, efficient image descriptor methods are becoming more and more important. Several local point-based description methods were defined in the past decades before the highly accurate and popular deep learning methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) emerged. The method presented in this work combines a novel local description approach inspired by the Gestalt laws with deep learning, and thereby, it benefits from both worlds. To test our method, we conducted several experiments on different datasets of various forensic application domains, e.g., makeup-robust face recognition. Our results show that the proposed approach is robust against overfitting and only little image information is necessary to classify the image content with high accuracy. Furthermore, we compared our experimental results to state-of-the-art description methods and found that our method is highly competitive. For example it outperforms a conventional CNN in terms of accuracy in the domain of makeup-robust face recognition.