Padding is a preprocessing step before a convolution operation.

When we convolve a \(n \times n\) image with an \(f \times f\) filter and a stride length of \(1\), the output is a matrix of dimension \(n - f \times n - f\).

For deep convolutional neural networks that may do many convolutions, this would cause the input matrix to dramatically shrink and become too small.

Additionally, values in the middle of the input matrix have a greater influence on the output than values on the edges.

There are several different methods for choosing what values to pad an input matrix with:

• Zero-padding – padding with zeroes
• Repeating the nearest border values as values for padding
• Using values from the opposite side of the matrix as padding values