# Deep Generalized Max Pooling

## TL;DR

Deep Generalized Max Pooling is a novel pooling method for CNNs that re-weights activations to balance contributions from different regions, improving classification and writer identification accuracy.

## Contribution

It introduces a new pooling layer that balances activations across regions, outperforming traditional average and max pooling in specific classification tasks.

## Key findings

- Outperforms average and max pooling in classification tasks
- Effective in medieval manuscript and writer identification
- Balances contributions of all activations across regions

## Abstract

Global pooling layers are an essential part of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). They are used to aggregate activations of spatial locations to produce a fixed-size vector in several state-of-the-art CNNs. Global average pooling or global max pooling are commonly used for converting convolutional features of variable size images to a fix-sized embedding. However, both pooling layer types are computed spatially independent: each individual activation map is pooled and thus activations of different locations are pooled together. In contrast, we propose Deep Generalized Max Pooling that balances the contribution of all activations of a spatially coherent region by re-weighting all descriptors so that the impact of frequent and rare ones is equalized. We show that this layer is superior to both average and max pooling on the classification of Latin medieval manuscripts (CLAMM'16, CLAMM'17), as well as writer identification (Historical-WI'17).