MS-CapsNet: A Novel Multi-Scale Capsule Network

Abstract

Capsule network is a novel architecture to encode the properties and spatial relationships of the feature in an image, which shows encouraging results on image classification. However, the original capsule network is not suitable for some classification tasks, where the target objects are complex internal representations. Hence, we propose a multi-scale capsule network that is more robust and efficient for feature representation in image classification. The proposed multi-scale capsule network consists of two stages. In the first stage, structural and semantic information are obtained by multi-scale feature extraction. In the second stage, the hierarchy of features is encoded to multi-dimensional primary capsules. Moreover, we propose an improved dropout to enhance the robustness of the capsule network. Experimental results show that our method has a competitive performance on FashionMNIST and CIFAR10 datasets.