PT-CapsNet: A Novel Prediction-Tuning Capsule Network Suitable for Deeper Architectures

Capsule Networks (CapsNets) create internal representations by parsing inputs into various instances at different resolution levels via a two-phase process – part-whole transformation and hierarchical component routing. Since both of these internal phases are computationally expensive, CapsNet have not found wider use. Existing variations of CapsNets mainly focus on performance comparison with the original CapsNet, and have not outperformed CNN-based models on complex tasks. To address the limitations of the existing CapsNet structures, we propose a novel Prediction-Tuning Capsule Network (PT-CapsNet), and also introduce fully connected PT-Capsules (FC-PT-Caps) and locally connected PT-Capsules (LC-PT-Caps). Different from existing CapsNet structures, our proposed model (i) allows the use of capsules for more difficult vision tasks and provides wider applicability; and (ii) provides better than or comparable performance to CNN-based baselines on these complex tasks. In our experiments, we show robustness to affine transformations, as well as the lightweight and scalability of PT-CapsNet via constructing larger and deeper networks and performing comparisons on classification, semantic segmentation and object detection tasks. The results show consistent performance improvement and significant parameter reduction compared to various baseline models. Code is available at https://github.com/Christinepan881/PT-CapsNet.git.