Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) require large image corpora to be
trained on classification tasks. The variation in image resolutions, sizes of
objects and patterns depicted, and image scales, hampers CNN training and
performance, because the task-relevant information varies over spatial scales.
Previous work attempting to deal with such scale variations focused on
encouraging scale-invariant CNN representations. However, scale-invariant
representations are incomplete representations of images, because images
contain scale-variant information as well. This paper addresses the combined
development of scale-invariant and scale-variant representations. We propose a
multi- scale CNN method to encourage the recognition of both types of features
and evaluate it on a challenging image classification task involving
task-relevant characteristics at multiple scales. The results show that our
multi-scale CNN outperforms single-scale CNN. This leads to the conclusion that
encouraging the combined development of a scale-invariant and scale-variant
representation in CNNs is beneficial to image recognition performance.

本文提出了一种多尺度卷积神经网络方法来促进卷积神经网络同时识别尺度不变和尺度变异的特征，并在涉及多个尺度的任务相关特征的挑战性图像分类任务上对其进行了评估。结果表明，我们的多尺度卷积神经网络优于单尺度卷积神经网络，从而得出结论：在卷积神经网络中鼓励尺度不变和尺度变异表示的结合对图像识别性能有益。