Histogram Layers for Neural “Engineered” Features

In the computer vision literature, many effective histogram-based features have been developed. These “engineered” features include local binary patterns and edge histogram descriptors among others and they have been shown to be informative features for a variety of computer vision tasks. In this paper, we explore whether these features can be learned through histogram layers embedded in a neural network and, therefore, be leveraged within deep learning frameworks. By using histogram features, local statistics of the feature maps from the convolution neural networks can be used to better represent the data. We present neural versions of local binary pattern and edge histogram descriptors that jointly improve feature representation for image classification. Experiments are presented on benchmark and real-world datasets. Our code is publicly available 11 https://github.com/Advanced-Vision-and-Learning-Lab/NEHD NLBP .