Convolutional Neural Networks Do Work with Pre-Defined Filters

We present a novel class of Convolutional Neural Networks called Pre-defined Filter Convolutional Neural Networks (PFCNNs), where all n x n convolution kernels with n > 1 are pre-defined and constant during training. It involves a special form of depthwise convolution operation called a Pre-defined Filter Module (PFM). In the channel-wise convolution part, the 1 x n x n kernels are drawn from a fixed pool of only a few (16) different pre-defined kernels. In the 1x1 convolution part linear combinations of the pre-defined filter outputs are learned. Despite this harsh restriction, complex and discriminative features are learned. These findings provide a novel perspective on the way how information is processed within deep CNNs. We discuss various properties of PFCNNs and prove their effectiveness using the popular datasets Caltech101, CIFAR10, CUB-200-2011, FGVCAircraft, Flowers102, and Stanford Cars. Our implementation of PFCNNs is provided on Github https://github.com/Criscraft/ PredefinedFilterNetworks.