  Invariance to geometric transformations is a highly desirable property of
automatic classifiers in many image recognition tasks. Nevertheless, it is
unclear to which extent state-of-the-art classifiers are invariant to basic
transformations such as rotations and translations. This is mainly due to the
lack of general methods that properly measure such an invariance. In this
paper, we propose a rigorous and systematic approach for quantifying the
invariance to geometric transformations of any classifier. Our key idea is to
cast the problem of assessing a classifier's invariance as the computation of
geodesics along the manifold of transformed images. We propose the Manitest
method, built on the efficient Fast Marching algorithm to compute the
invariance of classifiers. Our new method quantifies in particular the
importance of data augmentation for learning invariance from data, and the
increased invariance of convolutional neural networks with depth. We foresee
that the proposed generic tool for measuring invariance to a large class of
geometric transformations and arbitrary classifiers will have many applications
for evaluating and comparing classifiers based on their invariance, and help
improving the invariance of existing classifiers.
