How to determine the number of feature maps to use in a convolutional neural network layer?

Question

I've been doing a lot of reading on Conv Nets and even some playing using Julia's Mocha.jl package (which looks a lot like Caffe, but you can play with it in the Julia REPL).

In a Conv net, Convolution layers are followed by "feature map" layers. What I'm wondering is how does one determine how many feature maps a network needs to have to solve some particular problem? Is there any science to this or is it more art? I can see that if you're trying to make a classification at least that last layer should have number of feature maps == number of classes (unless you've got a fully connected MLP at the top of the network, I suppose).

In my case, I 'm not doing a classification so much as trying to come up with a value for every pixel in an image (I suppose this could be seen as a classification where the classes are from 0 to 255).

Edit: as pointed out in the comments, I'm trying to solve a regression problem where the outputs are in a range from 0 to 255 (grayscale in this case). Still, the question remains: How does one determine how many feature maps to use at any given convolution layer? Does this differ for a regression problem vs. a classification problem?

Answer 1

Basically, like any other hyperparameter - by evaluting results on separate development set and finding what number works best. It also worth checking publications that deal with similar problem and finding what number of feature maps they were using.