DFNet: A Differential Feature-Incorporated Residual Network for Image Recognition

Residual neural network (ResNet) is a powerful neural network architecture that has proven to be excellent in extracting spatial and channel-wise information of images. ResNet employs a residual learning strategy that maps inputs directly to outputs, making it less difficult to optimize. In this paper, we incorporate differential information into the original residual block to improve the representative ability of the ResNet, allowing the modified network to capture more complex and metaphysical features. The proposed DFNet preserves the features after each convolutional operation in the residual block, and combines the feature maps of different levels of abstraction through the differential information. To verify the effectiveness of DFNet on image recognition, we select six distinct classification datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed DFNet has better performance and generalization ability than other state-of-the-art variants of ResNet in terms of classification accuracy and other statistical analysis.