  Over the years, computer vision researchers have spent an immense amount of
effort on designing image features for the visual object recognition task. We
propose to incorporate this valuable experience to guide the task of training
deep neural networks. Our idea is to pretrain the network through the task of
replicating the process of hand-designed feature extraction. By learning to
replicate the process, the neural network integrates previous research
knowledge and learns to model visual objects in a way similar to the
hand-designed features. In the succeeding finetuning step, it further learns
object-specific representations from labeled data and this boosts its
classification power. We pretrain two convolutional neural networks where one
replicates the process of histogram of oriented gradients feature extraction,
and the other replicates the process of region covariance feature extraction.
After finetuning, we achieve substantially better performance than the baseline
methods.
