Gradual recovery based occluded digit images recognition

Recent research shows that auto-encoder is suitable to model a variation which varies smoothly. In this paper, we attempt to utilize auto-encoder to recognize partially occluded digit images with gradual recovery. We propose a new variation of auto-encoder, namely the “generalized auto-encoder”, and construct stacked generalized auto-encoders (SGAE) for the problem of occluded digit images recovery and recognition. Rather than recovering the occlusion directly, the degree of occlusion is regarded as a continuous variable, and the recovery task is regarded as a gradual process. We divide the whole task into multiple intermediate recovery procedures, and assign each procedure to one generalized auto-encoder, thus handling the recovery problem gradually. Based on the encouraging recovery results, the occluded digit images can be recognized well. The results demonstrate that gradual recovery outperforms direct recovery of the occluded region. Moreover, the main application in this paper is occluded digit images recognition, though, the proposed framework can be generalized to other problems easily and nicely. Extensive experiments are designed to verify our settings and show the effectiveness, extendibility and generalizability of the method.