  Polynomial regression is a recurrent problem with a large number of
applications. In computer vision it often appears in motion analysis. Whatever
the application, standard methods for regression of polynomial models tend to
deliver biased results when the input data is heavily contaminated by outliers.
Moreover, the problem is even harder when outliers have strong structure.
Departing from problem-tailored heuristics for robust estimation of parametric
models, we explore deep convolutional neural networks. Our work aims to find a
generic approach for training deep regression models without the explicit need
of supervised annotation. We bypass the need for a tailored loss function on
the regression parameters by attaching to our model a differentiable hard-wired
decoder corresponding to the polynomial operation at hand. We demonstrate the
value of our findings by comparing with standard robust regression methods.
Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use such models for a real computer vision
problem, i.e., video stabilization. The qualitative and quantitative
experiments show that neural networks are able to learn robustness for general
polynomial regression, with results that well overpass scores of traditional
robust estimation methods.
