Convolutional and Fully Connected Layer in DFN

Deep feedforward network (DFN) is the general structure of many well-known deep neural networks (DNN) for image classification. The recent research emphasizes on going deeper and wider network architecture to achieve higher accuracy and lower misclassification rate. This paper provides a study and investigation on stacking three basic operation of neural layers, i.e. convolutional layer, pooling layer and fully connected layer. As a result, a new framework of convolutional deep feedforward network (C-DFN) is proposed in this paper. C-DFN performed significantly better than deep feedforward network (DFN), deep belief network (DBN), and convolutional deep belief network (C-DBN) in MNIST dataset, INRIA pedestrian dataset and Daimler pedestrian dataset. The convolutional layer acts as a trainable feature extractor improving the network performance significantly. Moreover, it reduced 14% of the trainable parameters in DFN. With the use of trainable activation function such as PReLU in the C-DFN, it achieves an average misclassification rate of 9.22% of the three benchmark datasets.