Mixed Pooling for Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a biologically inspired trainable architecture that can learn invariant features for a number of applications. In general, CNNs consist of alternating convolutional layers, non-linearity layers and feature pooling layers. In this work, a novel feature pooling method, named as mixed pooling, is proposed to regularize CNNs, which replaces the deterministic pooling operations with a stochastic procedure by randomly using the conventional max pooling and average pooling methods. The advantage of the proposed mixed pooling method lies in its wonderful ability to address the overfitting problem encountered by CNN generation. Experimental results on three benchmark image classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed mixed pooling method is superior to max pooling, average pooling and some other state-of-the-art works known in the literature.