Image Classification Based on Light Convolutional Neural Network Using Pulse Couple Neural Network

Recently, most image classification studies solicit the intervention of convolutional neural networks because these DL-based classification methods generally outperform other methodologies with higher accuracy. However, this type of deep learning networks require many parameters and have a complex structure with multiple convolutional and pooling layers depending on the objective. These layers compute a large volume of data and it may impact the processing time and the performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method of image classification based on the light convolutional neural network. It consists of replacing the feature extraction layers of standard convolutional neural network with a single pulse coupled neural network by introducing the notion of foveation. This module provides the feature map of input image and the data compression using Discrete Wavelet Transform which is an optional step depending on the information quantity of this signature. The fully connected neural network, which has six hidden layers, classifies the image. With this technique, the computation time is reduced, and the network architecture is identical and simple independent of the type of dataset. The number of parameter is less than that in current research. The proposed method was validated with different dataset such as Caltech-101, Caltech-256, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, and the accuracy reaches 92%, 90%, 99%, 94%, and 91%, respectively, which are better than the previous related works.