Dynamic pooling using average-thresholding to improve image classification performance

Pooling layers are essential in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for reducing data size while preserving key features. Traditional methods such as Max and Average pooling have limitations. Max pooling is sensitive to noise, while Average pooling treats all activations equally. Although T-Max-Avg pooling addresses these limitations through adaptive top-k selection, its rigid decision rule requires multiple threshold comparisons and limits efficiency, motivating a simpler decision mechanism. This study introduces average-thresholding pooling (ATP), a simplified adaptive method that replaces multiple threshold comparisons with a single decision based on the average of the top-k activations. This design improves computational efficiency and reduces sensitivity to outliers. Experiments on the STL-10 dataset using a LeNet-5 architecture show that the proposed method achieves accuracy comparable to T-Max-Avg pooling (~55.5%) while consistently improving both training efficiency and inference speed. These results indicate that ATP provides a lightweight and practical alternative for CNN-based image classification, offering an improved balance between classification performance and computational efficiency.