  Deep Convolution Neural Networks (DCNNs) are capable of learning
unprecedentedly effective image representations. However, their ability in
handling significant local and global image rotations remains limited. In this
paper, we propose Active Rotating Filters (ARFs) that actively rotate during
convolution and produce feature maps with location and orientation explicitly
encoded. An ARF acts as a virtual filter bank containing the filter itself and
its multiple unmaterialised rotated versions. During back-propagation, an ARF
is collectively updated using errors from all its rotated versions. DCNNs using
ARFs, referred to as Oriented Response Networks (ORNs), can produce
within-class rotation-invariant deep features while maintaining inter-class
discrimination for classification tasks. The oriented response produced by ORNs
can also be used for image and object orientation estimation tasks. Over
multiple state-of-the-art DCNN architectures, such as VGG, ResNet, and STN, we
consistently observe that replacing regular filters with the proposed ARFs
leads to significant reduction in the number of network parameters and
improvement in classification performance. We report the best results on
several commonly used benchmarks.
