A convolutional neural network model of multi-scale feature fusion: MFF-Net

Abstract

MFF-Net (a multi-scale feature fusion convolutional neural network) was designed to improve the recognition rate of handwritten digits. The low-level, middle-level and high-level features of the image were first extracted through the convolution operation, and then the low-level and intermediate features were further extracted through different convolutional layers, later directly fused with the high-level features of the image with a certain weight, and then processed by the full connection layer. By adding a batch normalization layer before the activation layer, and a dropout layer between the full connection layers, the accuracy and generalization capacity of the network are improved. At the same time, a dynamic learning rate algorithm was designed, with which, the trained network accuracy was significantly improved as shown in the experiments on the MNIST data set. The accurate rate could reach 99.66% through only 30 epochs training. The comparison indicated that the accuracy of the network model is significantly higher than that of others.