  One of the main challenges since the advancement of convolutional neural
networks is how to connect the extracted feature map to the final
classification layer. VGG models used two sets of fully connected layers for
the classification part of their architectures, which significantly increases
the number of models' weights. ResNet and next deep convolutional models used
the Global Average Pooling (GAP) layer to compress the feature map and feed it
to the classification layer. Although using the GAP layer reduces the
computational cost, but also causes losing spatial resolution of the feature
map, which results in decreasing learning efficiency. In this paper, we aim to
tackle this problem by replacing the GAP layer with a new architecture called
Wise-SrNet. It is inspired by the depthwise convolutional idea and is designed
for processing spatial resolution and also not increasing computational cost.
We have evaluated our method using three different datasets: Intel Image
Classification Challenge, MIT Indoors Scenes, and a part of the ImageNet
dataset. We investigated the implementation of our architecture on several
models of Inception, ResNet and DensNet families. Applying our architecture has
revealed a significant effect on increasing convergence speed and accuracy. Our
Experiments on images with 224x224 resolution increased the Top-1 accuracy
between 2% to 8% on different datasets and models. Running our models on
512x512 resolution images of the MIT Indoors Scenes dataset showed a notable
result of improving the Top-1 accuracy within 3% to 26%. We will also
demonstrate the GAP layer's disadvantage when the input images are large and
the number of classes is not few. In this circumstance, our proposed
architecture can do a great help in enhancing classification results. The code
is shared at https://github.com/mr7495/image-classification-spatial.
