Multiactivation Pooling Method in Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Recognition

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming more and more popular today. CNNs now have become a popular feature extractor applying to image processing, big data processing, fog computing, etc. CNNs usually consist of several basic units like convolutional unit, pooling unit, activation unit, and so on. In CNNs, conventional pooling methods refer to 2x2 max-pooling and average-pooling, which are applied after the convolutional or ReLU layers. In this paper, we propose a Multiactivation Pooling ( MAP) Method to make the CNNs more accurate on classification tasks without increasing depth and trainable parameters. We add more convolutional layers before one pooling layer and expand the pooling region to 4x4, 8x8, 16x16, and even larger. When doing large-scale subsampling, we pick top-k activation, sum up them, and constrain them by a hyperparameter sigma. We pick VGG, ALL-CNN, and DenseNets as our baseline models and evaluate our proposed MAP method on benchmark datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet. The classification results are competitive.