2021 International Electrical Engineering Congress (iEECON2021) (Full Manuscript)
March 10-12, 2021, Pattaya, THAILAND
Impacts of Kernel Size on Different Resized Images
in Object Recognition
Based on Convolutional Neural Network
Danupon Chansong
College of Digital Innovation Technology,
2021 9th International Electrical Engineering Congress (iEECON) | 978-1-7281-9584-1/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/iEECON51072.2021.9440284
Rangsit University,
Pathum-thani, Thailand
danuponc@gmail.com
Abstract— This paper focuses a study on impacts of
kernel sizes on different resized image relying on
convolutional neural network (CNN) for object
recognition. Two sets of convolutional neural network
(CNN) deep learning models: Conv573 and Conv3,
based on shallow feed-forward-architecture network
are employed here for feature extraction with
comparative assessment purpose. The Conv573 refers to
CNN with kernel size of 7×7, 5×5 and 3×3; whilst the
Conv3 represents that of only 3×3 kernel size; where
three and two convolutional layers of 3×3 kernel size are
consecutively comparable to one convolutional layer of
7×7 and 5×5 kernel sizes. The experiments rely on
different-resized CIFAR-10 image dataset, 50×50,
100×100 and 150×150 pixels for testing with the
Conv573 and Conv3 models. For the purpose of bias
reduction, recognition performance assessments depend
on averages of precision, recall, F1 and accuracy rates,
based upon 10-fold cross validation. The results indicate
that the greater the size of an image is, the better the
recognition accuracy would be based on Conv573,
conversely for Conv3. 2.65% and 0.06% recognition
accuracy improvement based on Conv573, whereas
0.39% and 1.76% performance decrease based on
Conv3 are respectively yielded when resizing image
from 50×50 to 100×100 and from 100×100 to 150×150.
For 50×50 and 100×100 resized images, Conv3 yields
4.74% and 1.64% better averaged accuracy than
Conv573; nevertheless, Conv573 generates 0.18% better
averaged accuracy than Conv3 on 150×150 resized ones.
Keywords— convolutional neural network, object
recognition, deep learning, kernel size
I. INTRODUCTION
Object recognition [1] is regarded as one of image
analysis systems, where the correct category/class of
an object is extracted. Using some number of stacked
convolutional layers, deep learning convolutional
neural networks (CNNs) perform well- capturing
significant features of objects from images without
requiring those features to be explicitly defined a
priori. LeNet-5 [2], one of the earliest CNNs has
typically had stacked convolutional layer; it has been
designed for recognizing handwritten fonts and
computer-printed characters. AlexNet [1], containing
more multiple stacks of deep learning network than
LeNet-5 employs rectified linear activation unit
(ReLU) to solve gradient dispersion of Sigmoid in
LeNet-5 deep network. Unlike LeNet-5 and AlexNet
978-1-7281-9584-1/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Siriporn Supratid
College of Digital Innovation Technology,
Rangsit University,
Pathum-thani, Thailand
siriporn.su@rsu.ac.th
where large kernel-sized filters are used to obtain
similar features in an image, VGGNet [3] replaces
those large kernels with several small 3×3 kernel-
sized filters that enable to characterizes, at a lower
cost, more complex features. According to recently
past researches, the work [4] employed deep CNN on
CIFAR-10 to obtain average of 87.57% accuracy
during testing phase. Particular deep CNNs were
utilized on medical images classification in terms of
anatomy specificity, using 4,298 separate axial 2D
key-images to learn 5 anatomical classes [5]. The
averaged results showed of 5.9 % classification errors
and 0.998 area-under-the-curve (AUC) values on
testing data. A comparative study on CIFAR-10 using
batch normalization, rectified linear unit (ReLU) and
exponential linear unit (ELU) activation in DenseNet,
VGGNet, residual network and inception-v3 CNNs
was carried out in [6]. 89.91% best recognition
accuracy was yielded by VGGNet with the use of
ELU. With regard to [7], CIFAR-10 was tested on five
CNN models for embedded systems, varying by
adding or changing learning rate, batch normalization
and dropout layers. Such five models achieved around
85.3% to 85.9% of accuracy rates. Comparatively
investigation on the impact of kernel size on four
CNN architectures with 3×3, 7×7, 5×5 and 9×9
kernel-size, using histopathological images was
carried out in [8]. In addition, the works [9,10] applied
two and three convolutional layers of CNNs with 3×3
kernel-size instead of using one convolutional layer
with 5×5 and 7×7 kernel-size respectively. This relied
upon the simple intuitions saying that stacking small
kernel-sized convolutional layers would reduce
parameters and push network going deeper, which
improve learning results. By using such 3×3 kernel-
size CNNs, 94.34% and 73.65% of accuracy rates
were yielded consecutively on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-
100 [9]; whilst the work [10], employing smaller
number of CNN layers produced 86.45%.
Nevertheless, the impact of kernel size on various
resized images in object recognition has not yet been
prevalently explored.
This paper studies on effects of kernel sizes on
different resized image based on two models of
shallow feed-forward-architecture CNN, Conv573 and
Conv3 for object recognition. The Conv573 refers to
CNN with kernel size of 7×7, 5×5 and 3×3; whilst the
Conv3 represents that of only 3×3 kernel size, where
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 2021 International Electrical Engineering Congress (iEECON2021) (Full Manuscript)
March 10-12, 2021, Pattaya, THAILAND

three and two convolutional layers of 3×3 kernel size parameters used for Conv3 and Conv573 models are
are respectively comparable to one convolutional layer 5.289 and 5.367 millions, respectively.
of 7×7 and 5×5 kernel sizes. The extracted features
resulted by the CNNs are fed into softmax
classification for object recognition. The empirical
experiments depend on CIFAR-10 image dataset of
different resize, 50×50, 100×100 and 150×150 pixels
to be tested on the Conv573 and Conv3 models.
Recognition performance measurements depend on
precision, recall, F1 as well as accuracy rates,
averaged on 10-fold cross validation of training and
testing image sets, different randomly selected. Such
cross validation is carried out to guarantee unbiased
experimental results. Confusion matrix is also
determined for more detail of results investigation.
The rest of this paper is arranged as follows. Section II
presents Conv573 as well as Conv3 used in this study.
Experimental results are demonstrated in section III.
Finally, section IV concludes the paper.
II. CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS
(CNNS): CONV573 AND CONV3
According to comparative assessment purpose,
shallow 3-phase CNNs, employing deep learning
feed-forward-architecture neural network are utilized
here for feature extraction, as shown in Fig. 1(a) and
(b). Shallow CNN refers to a simple network structure
having few network parameters, occupying few
computation resources and memory. Fig. 1(a) displays
an architecture of Conv3, where all convolutional
layers employ 3×3 receptive-field kernel filters;
whereas convolutional layers in Fig. 1(b), showing
Conv573 architecture use 7×7, 5×5 and 3×3 sizes of
kernel filters. As aforementioned, three and two
convolutional layers of 3×3 kernel size are
respectively comparably equivalent to one
convolutional layer of 7×7 and 5×5 kernel sizes. All
hidden layers are equipped with y = max(0, x) (a)
rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function. After
each convolutional layer, dropout [11] and batch-
normalization are applied. For each layer, dropout
probability is implemented to avoid over-fitting. The
batch-normalization normalizes every layer’s inputs
based on y =  (x −  ) /  +  where  = x and
 2 = ( x −  )2 ; x and y are input and normalized
feature map consecutively; γ and β, respectively
setting to 1 and 0 in this study are learnable
parameters. The input of every layer is forced by such
normalization to have nearly same distribution in all
training steps, aiding the network converged faster
with lower error rate. In addition, after each of the
four phases, max pooling of 2×2 pool size is also
executed to halfly reduce the size of feature maps. The
aim of this is to extract low level features from a
neighborhood and decrease variance as well as
computation complexity. In the final layer, global
average pooling along with fully connected neural
(b)
network transform the feature maps into 512-element Fig. 1. Architectures of (a) Conv3; (b) Conv573
feature vectors. For further object recognition process,
such a feature vector is then fed into softmax [12],
known as multinomial logistic classifier which
provides linear classification boundaries. Total

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 2021 International Electrical Engineering Congress (iEECON2021) (Full Manuscript)
March 10-12, 2021, Pattaya, THAILAND

Fig. 2. Confusion matrices, with respect to Conv573 based on the best F1 scores.

Fig. 3. Confusion matrices, with respect to Conv3 based on the best F1 scores.

shown in parentheses. The results in Table I indicate

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this work, the Conv573 and Conv3 are applied
on CIFAR-10 dataset [7], containing 32×32 of 60,000
color images in 10 classes, approximately 6,000
images per class. In order to investigate effects of
kernel sizes on different resized images, CIFAR-10
images are resized to 50×50, 100×100 and 150×150
pixels. 10-fold cross validation is executed by
randomly splitting the 60,000 images of CIFAR-10
dataset into 80% training and 20% testing of 10
different folds for bias reduction purpose.
Performance assessments depend on precision, recall,
F1 and accuracy rates. Precision refers to the ratio of
correctly predicted positive observations (true positive
or TP) to the total predicted positive observations (true
positive plus false positive or TP+FP); whilst, recall is
the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations
(TP) to the all observations in actual class (true
positive plus false negative or TP+FN). F1 scores,
taking false positives as well as false negatives into
account represents the weighted average of precision
and recall. An accuracy rate represents the ratio of
correctly predicted observation (TP+TN) to the total
observations (TP+FP+FN+TN). It is noticed that true
negative or TN is taken into an account on accuracy
rate computation; whereas only TP is taken into an
account on F1 scores.
According to testing sets, the performance results
are averaged over the 10-fold cross validation, as
exhibited in Table I, where non-significant, small
values of standard deviation (S.D.) (italic faces) are
2.65% and 0.06% recognition accuracy improvement
based on Conv573, whereas 0.39% and 1.76%
performance decrease based on Conv3 are
respectively yielded when increasing image size from
50 ×50 to 100×100 and from 100×100 to 150×150.
For 50×50 and 100×100 resized images, Conv3 yields
4.74% and 1.64% better averaged accuracy than
Conv573; however, Conv573 generates 0.18% better
averaged accuracy than Conv3 with regard to
150×150 resized ones. Confusion matrices based on
the best F1 scores over the 10-fold cross validation
with respect to three resized-image, yielded by
Conv573 and Conv3 are respectively shown in Fig. 2
and 3 for deep-down investigation on the results in
Table I. Considering those confusion matrices, the
largest and the second largest numbers of wrong
prediction are produced in a manner that dogs are
wrongly predicted as cats, and vice versa for both
Conv573 and Conv3 for all image sizes. These are due
to the object similarity between those two classes.

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 2021 International Electrical Engineering Congress (iEECON2021) (Full Manuscript)
March 10-12, 2021, Pattaya, THAILAND

TABLE I. PERFORMANCE RESULTS RELYING ON TESTING REFERENCES

SETS, AVERAGED ON THE 10-FOLD CROSS VALIDATION
[1] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, and G.E. Hinton, “ImageNet
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Precision Recall F1 Acc
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0.84593 0.84243 0.84169 0.84170
Conv573 [2] W. Rawat and Z. Wang, “Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
(0.004) (0.009) (0.008) (0.008)
0.88170 0.88176 0.88090 0.88158 for Image Classification: A Comprehensive Review,” Neural
Conv3 Computation, vol. 29, No. 9, 2017, pp. 2352 -2449.
(0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
[3] K. Simonyan and A. Zisserman, "Very deep convolutional
100x100
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Diego, CA, 2015, pp. 1-14.
0.86721 0.86479 0.86436 0.86402
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0.86627 0.86522 0.86422 0.86453 [6] V. Thakkar, S. Tewary and C. Chakraborty, "Batch
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