Implications of Pooling Strategies in Convolutional Neural Networks: A Deep Insight

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) is a contemporary technique for computer vision applications, where pooling implies as an integral part of the deep CNN. Besides, pooling provides the ability to learn invariant features and also acts as a regularizer to further reduce the problem of overfitting. Additionally, the pooling techniques significantly reduce the computational cost and training time of networks which are equally important to consider. Here, the performances of pooling strategies on different datasets are analyzed and discussed qualitatively. This study presents a detailed review of the conventional and the latest strategies which would help in appraising the readers with the upsides and downsides of each strategy. Also, we have identified four fundamental factors namely network architecture, activation function, overlapping and regularization approaches which immensely affect the performance of pooling operations. It is believed that this work would help in extending the scope of understanding the significance of CNN along with pooling regimes for solving computer vision problems.