The 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) was held in the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre, Athens, Greece, from October 7-10, 2018. ICIP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on image and video processing and computer vision. The theme of ICIP 2018 will be “Imaging beyond imagination”. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and a vision technology showcase.

MCL Director, Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo, delivered the Plenary Speech entitled with “Unveil Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Go Beyond” on Oct. 8, 2018. Professor Kuo has worked on theoretical understanding of CNNs since 2015 and published a sequence of papers on this topic. This speech contained main results of his research endeavor.

Specifically, Professor Kuo described a new interpretable feedforward CNN design methodology. It does not demand any backpropagation. This design adopts a data-centric approach and derives network parameters of the current layer based on data statistics from the output of the previous layer. This process continues layer after layer in one pass. The feedforward design leads to a CNN that has a classification performance close to the one designed by backpropagation. Yet, it is more robust with respect to adversarial attacks. Above all, it is mathematically transparent.

Professor Kuo has a paper entitled with “Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks via Feedforward Design” as the main reference. It can be downloaded from the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02786.