Residual network with dense block

We propose a residual network with dense block (RNDB) to obtain a higher performance over the original residual network (ResNet). In the designed RNDB, a small dense block in the basic architecture of the residual block is introduced to enhance the feature mapping. As such, the application of the dense block helps the underlying ResNet adequately use the feature maps with dense connections. Thus, the optimization ability of the RNDBs is significantly promoted. In addition, the dense block is adopted in the variants of ResNet such as the residual networks of residual networks (RoR) and wide residual network (WRN) to further improve their performances. Finally, the experiments are utilized to demonstrate the validity of the employment of the dense block to the ResNets, RoRs, and WRNs, where the state-of-the-art result is effectively achieved on CIFAR-10 compared to the original ResNets, RoRs, and WRNs, respectively.