Detachable Second-Order Pooling: Toward High-Performance First-Order Networks

Second-order pooling has proved to be more effective than its first-order counterpart in visual classification tasks. However, second-order pooling suffers from the high demand for a computational resource, limiting its use in practical applications. In this work, we present a novel architecture, namely a detachable second-order pooling network, to leverage the advantage of second-order pooling by first-order networks while keeping the model complexity unchanged during inference. Specifically, we introduce second-order pooling at the end of a few auxiliary branches and plug them into different stages of a convolutional neural network. During the training stage, the auxiliary second-order pooling networks assist the backbone first-order network to learn more discriminative feature representations. When training is completed, all auxiliary branches can be removed, and only the backbone first-order network is used for inference. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet data sets clearly demonstrated the leading performance of our network, which achieves even higher accuracy than second-order networks but keeps the low inference complexity of first-order networks.