Hybrid pooling with wavelets for convolutional neural networks

The need to detect and classify objects correctly is a constant challenge, being able to recognize them at different scales and scenarios, sometimes cropped or badly lit is not an easy task. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have become a widely applied technique since they are completely trainable and suitable to extract features. However, the growing number of convolutional neural networks applications constantly pushes their accuracy improvement. Initially, those improvements involved the use of large datasets, augmentation techniques, and complex algorithms. These methods may have a high computational cost. Nevertheless, feature extraction is known to be the heart of the problem. As a result, other approaches combine different technologies to extract better features to improve the accuracy without the need of more powerful hardware resources. In this paper, we propose a hybrid pooling method that incorporates multiresolution analysis within the CNN layers to reduce the feature map size without losing details. To prevent relevant information from losing during the downsampling process an existing pooling method is combined with wavelet transform technique, keeping those details "alive" and enriching other stages of the CNN. Achieving better quality characteristics improves CNN accuracy. To validate this study, ten pooling methods, including the proposed model, are tested using four benchmark datasets. The results are compared with four of the evaluated methods, which are also considered as the state-of-the-art.