Appropriate Number of Standard 2 × 2 Max Pooling Layers and Their Allocation in Convolutional Neural Networks for Diverse and Heterogeneous Datasets

A problem of appropriately allocating pooling layers in convolutional neural networks is considered. The consideration is based on CIFAR-10, NORB, and EEACL26 datasets for preventing “overfitting” in a solution of the problem. For highly accurate image recognition within these datasets, the networks are used with the max pooling operation. The most common form of such operation, which is a 2 × 2 pooling layer, is applied with a stride of 2 without padding after convolutional layers. Based on performance against a series of the network architectures, a rule for the best allocation of max pooling layers is formulated. The rule is to insert a few pooling layers after the starting convolutional layers and to insert a one pooling layer after the last but one convolutional layer (“11...100...010”). For much simpler datasets, the best allocation is “11...100...0”.