Network In Network

We propose a novel network structure called "Network In Network" (NIN) to enhance the model discriminability for local receptive fields. The conventional convolutional layer uses linear filters followed by a nonlinear activation function to scan the input. Instead, we build micro neural networks with more complex structures to handle the variance of the local receptive fields. We instantiate the micro neural network with a nonlinear multiple layer structure which is a potent function approximator. The feature maps are obtained by sliding the micro networks over the input in a similar manner of CNN and then fed into the next layer. The deep NIN is thus implemented as stacking of multiple sliding micro neural networks. We demonstrated state-of-the-art classification performances with NIN on CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and MINST datasets.