Hybrid nonlinear convolution filters for image recognition

Typical convolutional filter only extract features linearly. Although nonlinearities are introduced into the feature extraction layer by using activation functions and pooling operations, they can only provide point-wise nonlinearity. In this paper, a Gaussian convolution for extracting nonlinear features is proposed, and a hybrid nonlinear convolution filter consisting of baseline convolution, Gaussian convolution and other nonlinear convolutions is designed. It can efficiently achieve the fusion of linear features and nonlinear features while preserving the advantages of traditional linear convolution filter in feature extraction. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 show that the hybrid nonlinear convolutional neural network has faster convergence and higher image recognition accuracy than the traditional baseline convolutional neural network.