A stochastic max pooling strategy for convolutional neural network trained by noisy samples

Abstract

The deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has made remarkable progress in image classification. However, this network performs poorly and even cannot converge in many actual applications, where the training and test samples contain lots of noises. To solve the problems, this paper puts forward a network training strategy based on stochastic max pooling. Unlike the traditional max pooling, the proposed strategy first ranks all the values in each receptive field, and then selects a random value from the top-n values as the pooling result. Compared with common pooling methods, stochastic max pooling can limit the pooling selection to a larger value that represents the main information of the pooling area which reduces the chance of introducing noises into the network, and enhances the robustness of extracting noisy image features. Experimental results show that the CNN used stochastic max pooling Strategy can converge better than traditional CNN and classified noisy images much more accurately than traditional pooling methods.