A sparsity-based stochastic pooling mechanism for deep convolutional neural networks

A novel sparsity-based stochastic pooling which integrates the advantages of max-pooling, average-pooling and stochastic pooling is introduced. The proposed pooling is designed to balance the advantages and disadvantages of max-pooling and average-pooling by using the degree of sparsity of activations and a control function to obtain an optimized representative feature value ranging from average value to maximum value of a pooling region. The...