  Finding suitable features has been an essential problem in computer vision.
We focus on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), which, despite their
versatility, cannot accommodate transformations that may occur in the scene. As
a result, several approaches have been proposed that consider a set of
transformations, which are used to either augment the training set or transform
the actual learned filters. In this paper, we propose the Explicit
Rotation-Invariant Restricted Boltzmann Machine, which exploits prior
information coming from the dominant orientation of images. Our model extends
the standard RBM, by adding a suitable number of weight matrices, associated
with each dominant gradient. We show that our approach is able to learn
rotation-invariant features, comparing it with the classic formulation of RBM
on the MNIST benchmark dataset. Overall, requiring less hidden units, our
method learns compact features, which are robust to rotations.
