Reduce receptive field size of CNN while keeping its capacity?

Question

I have a convolutional encoder (a CNN) consisting of DenseBlocks and a total of 50 layers (cf. FC-DenseNet103). The receptive field of the encoder (after last layer) is 660 according to Tensorflow function compute_receptive_field_from_graph_def(..)) whereas the input image is 64x64 pixels. Obviously the receptive field is way too big.

How can the receptive field be reduced to say 46 but the capacity of the encoder be more or less kept at the same level? By capacity I simply mean the number of parameters of the model. The capacity requirement is justified due to the complex dataset to be processed.

Using less layers or smaller kernels reduces the receptive field size but also the capacity. Should I then just increase the number of filters in the remaining layers in order to keep the capacity?

Answer 1

One way to keep the capacity while reducing the receptive field size is to add 1x1 conv layers instead of 3x3 (I did so within the DenseBlocks, there the first layer is a 3x3 conv and now followed by 4 times a 1x1 conv layer instead of the original 3x3 convs (which increase the receptive field)). In doing that, the number of parameters can be kept at a similar level. While 1x1 convolutions are good to add non-linearity, they are not useful to learn spatial information where neighboring pixels/values correlate. This might turn out to be a problem.

Therefore, experiments will have to show if this idea of adding 1x1 conv layers to keep the capacity proves useful or not in learning spatial features on a natural image data set.