Comparison of Foveated Downsampling Techniques in Image Recognition

Abstract


 Foveation is an important part of human vision, and a number of deep networks have also used foveation. However, there have been few systematic comparisons between foveating and non-foveating deep networks, and between different variable-resolution downsampling methods. Here we define several such methods, and compare their performance on ImageNet recognition with a custom Densenet network. The best variable-resolution method slightly outperforms uniform downsampling. Thus in our experiments, foveation does not substantially help or hinder object recognition in deep networks.