# Pooling

 Revision as of 07:00, 14 May 2011 (view source)Cyfoo (Talk | contribs) (Created page with "=== Pooling === Now that you have obtained an array of convolved features, you might try using these features for classification. However, thinking about why we decided to obtai...")← Older edit Latest revision as of 04:17, 8 April 2013 (view source)Kandeng (Talk | contribs) Line 1: Line 1: - === Pooling === + == Pooling: Overview == - Now that you have obtained an array of convolved features, you might try using these features for classification. However, thinking about why we decided to obtain convolved features suggests a further step that could improve our classification performance. Recall that we decided to obtain convolved features because we thought that the features for the large image would simply be the features for smaller patches translated around the large image. This suggests to us that what we might really be interested in are the feature activations independent of some small translations. You can see why this might be so intuitively - if you were to take an MNIST digit and translate it left or right, you would want your classifier to still accurately classify it as the same digit regardless of its final position. + After obtaining features using convolution, we would next like to use them for classification. In theory, one could use all the extracted features with a classifier such as a softmax classifier, but this can be computationally challenging. Consider for instance images of size 96x96 pixels, and suppose we have learned 400 features over 8x8 inputs. Each convolution results in an output of size $(96-8+1)*(96-8+1)=7921$, and since we have 400 features, this results in a vector of $89^2 * 400 = 3,168,400$ features per example. Learning a classifier with inputs having 3+ million features can be unwieldy, and can also be prone to over-fitting. - Hence, what we are really interested in is the '''translation-invariant''' feature activation - we want to know whether there is an edge, regardless of whether it is at $(1, 1), (3, 3)$ or $(5, 5)$, though perhaps if it is at $(50, 50)$ we might want to treat it as a separate edge. This suggests that what we should do is to take the maximum (or perhaps mean) activation of the convolved features around a certain small region, hence making our resultant pooled features less sensitive to small translations. + To address this, first recall that we decided to obtain convolved features because images have the "stationarity" property, which implies that features that are useful in one region are also likely to be useful for other regions.  Thus, to describe a large image, one natural approach is to aggregate statistics of these features at various locations.  For example, one could compute the mean (or max) value of a particular feature over a region of the image. These summary statistics are much lower in dimension (compared to using all of the extracted features) and can also improve results (less over-fitting).  We aggregation operation is called this operation '''pooling''', or sometimes '''mean pooling''' or '''max pooling''' (depending on the pooling operation applied). + The following image shows how pooling is done over 4 non-overlapping regions of the image. + [[File:Pooling_schematic.gif]] [[File:Pooling_schematic.gif]] - Formally, after obtaining our convolved features as earlier, we decide the size of the region, say $m \times n$ to pool our convolved features over. Then, we divide our convolved features into disjoint $m \times n$ regions, and take the maximum (or mean) feature activation over these regions to obtain the pooled convolved features. These pooled features can then be used for classification. + == Pooling for Invariance == + + If one chooses the pooling regions to be contiguous areas in the image and only pools features generated from the same (replicated) hidden units. Then, these pooling units will then be '''translation invariant'''. This means that the same (pooled) feature will be active even when the image undergoes (small) translations. Translation-invariant features are often desirable; in many tasks (e.g., object detection, audio recognition), the label of the example (image) is the same even when the image is translated. For example,  if you were to take an MNIST digit and translate it left or right, you would want your classifier to still accurately classify it as the same digit regardless of its final position. + + == Formal description == + + Formally, after obtaining our convolved features as described earlier, we decide the size of the region, say $m \times n$ to pool our convolved features over. Then, we divide our convolved features into disjoint $m \times n$ regions, and take the mean (or maximum) feature activation over these regions to obtain the pooled convolved features. These pooled features can then be used for classification. + + + + {{Languages|池化|中文}}