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
$n\times n$
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
$1\times n\times n$
kernels are drawn from a fixed pool of only a few (16) different pre-defined kernels. In the
$1\times 1$
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, FGVC-Aircraft, Flowers102, and Stanford Cars. Our implementation of PFCNNs is provided on Github https://github.com/Criscraft/PredefinedFilterNetworks.