Measuring the naturalness of images is important to generate realistic images or to detect unnatural regions in images. Additionally, a method to measure naturalness can be complementary to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based features, which are known to be insensitive to the naturalness of images. However, most probabilistic image models have insufficient capability of modeling the complex and abstract naturalness that we feel because they are built directly on raw image pixels. In this work, we assume that naturalness can be measured by the predictability on high-level features during eye movement. Based on this assumption, we propose a novel method to evaluate the naturalness by building a variant of Recurrent Neural Network Language Models on pre-trained CNN representations. Our method is applied to two tasks, demonstrating that 1) using our method as a regularizer enables us to generate more understandable images from image features than existing approaches, and 2) unnaturalness maps produced by our method achieve state-of-the-art eye fixation prediction performance on two well-studied datasets.
Our reconstruction method is based on the work by Mahendran and Vedaldi @cite_17 . Instead of using a hand-crafted natural image prior, we use RNNLM trained on natural images as a regularizer.
@cite_17
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Image representations, from SIFT and Bag of Visual Words to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are a crucial component of almost any image understanding system. Nevertheless, our understanding of them remains limited. In this paper we conduct a direct analysis of the visual information contained in representations by asking the following question: given an encoding of an image, to which extent is it possible to reconstruct the image itself? To answer this question we contribute a general framework to invert representations. We show that this method can invert representations such as HOG more accurately than recent alternatives while being applicable to CNNs too. We then use this technique to study the inverse of recent state-of-the-art CNN image representations for the first time. Among our findings, we show that several layers in CNNs retain photographically accurate information about the image, with different degrees of geometric and photometric invariance.