Texture and Materials Image Classification Based on Wavelet Pooling Layer in CNN

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been proposed as a solution in texture and material classification in computer vision. However, inside CNNs, the internal layers of pooling often cause a loss of information and, therefore, is detrimental to learning the architecture. Moreover, when considering images with repetitive and essential patterns, the loss of this information affects the performance of subsequent stages, such as feature extraction and analysis. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose a classification system with a new pooling method called Discrete Wavelet Transform Pooling (DWTP). This method is based on the image decomposition into sub-bands, in which the first level sub-band is considered as its output. The objective is to obtain approximation and detail information. As a result, this information can be concatenated in different combinations. In addition, wavelet pooling uses wavelets to reduce the size of the feature map. Combining these methods provides acceptable classification performance for three databases (CIFAR-10, DTD, and FMD). We argue that this helps eliminate overfitting and that the learning graphs reflect that the datasets show learning generalization. Therefore, our results indicate that our method based on wavelet analysis is feasible for texture and material classification. Moreover, in some cases, it outperforms traditional methods.