Extracting Useful features from large convolutional layers

Question

I have been training a convolutional neural network on emotion detection. Now, I would like to extract features for my data to train an LSTM layer. In my case, the top convolutional layers in the network has the following dimensions: [None, 4, 4, 512] and [None, 4, 4, 1024]. Therefore, this will give a total of 8192 and 16384 dimensional vectors. This is too large to train an LSTM layer. Therefore, I would like to know what is the best possible way to reduce the dimensionality of this vector? In other words, should I apply global average pooling to the conv layer after obtaining the activation or any other dimensionality reduction technique? In this case, my features will be a vector of 512 or 1024 dimensions, which makes sense.

Any help is much appreciated!!

Answer 1

Applying a pooling layer following a convolution is a standard way to reduce the size of the input matrix and get the invariant features. You might also want to consider adding a dense layer with a smaller number of output neurons.

Answer 2

1- Applying multiple convolution layers result in more sophisticated/rich features extraction. This will also reduce the dimensions of the feature maps.

2- Max-Pooling after convolutions is also an excellent way of extracting the most impacting features from an overall set of feature maps.