About the FC layer in a CNN So we know that the major disadvantage of pushing images through an ANN is due to the loss of information, particularly spatial information.
But in regards to CNNs, in the last layer of the convolutions just before the fully connected layer, is there some form of flattening of the convolved layer just before we feed it into the Multi layer net?
If so then, just like ANNs, wouldn’t we be losing some representation of features or the order in which its represented?
P.S My take on the answer would be that since we go through a process of continuously convolving and pooling, by the time we get to the fully connected layer we would have extracted the features that are invariant of location so now all we have to do is understand the connection between the pixels via ANNs?
 A: There is nothing special about using convolutional layers. In fact, for simple problems like MNIST, you could use simple neural network. Why we use convolutional layers, is because they use sliding windows that detect features of images no matter where are they located in the picture. If the image is centred, that's not the case. Notice that each of the windows produces the centered representation of some feature, hence you could pass their outputs to standard fully connected layer, same as you pass MNIST images. Moreover, in the end you need to use something like fully connected layer, since you need to "compress" the image into a scalar for binary classification, or a vector of probabilities for multi-class classification, there's no way how you could use convolutional layer for that. Also keep in mind, that the network is trained as a whole, so the convolutional layers need to produce such output, that could be easily translated by the fully connected layers into labels, so you assume in here that the network would figure out how to do this during the training.
