Frequency Pooling: Shift-Equivalent and Anti-Aliasing Downsampling

Abstract: Convolution utilizes a shift-equivalent prior of images, thus leading to great success in image processing tasks. However, commonly used poolings in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), such as max-pooling, average-pooling, and strided-convolution, are not shift-equivalent. Thus, the shift-equivalence of CNNs is destroyed when convolutions and poolings are stacked. Moreover, anti-aliasing is another essential property of poolings from the perspective of signal processing. However, recent poolings are neither shift-equivalent nor anti-aliasing. To address this issue, we propose a new pooling method that is shift-equivalent and anti-aliasing, named frequency pooling. Frequency pooling first transforms the features into the frequency domain, and then removes the frequency components beyond the Nyquist frequency. Finally, it transforms the features back to the spatial domain. We prove that frequency pooling is shift-equivalent and anti-aliasing based on the property of Fourier transform and Nyquist frequency. Experiments on image classification show that frequency pooling improves accuracy and robustness with respect to the shifts of CNNs.