[MayanAstronaut]

True, it comparisons do a lot better with more features.

This paper looks to just show the major winning aspect of using CovNets as they do not need many features as the deep net learns its own representations of the training data. It more to show CovNets work on more then just vision.

But architeching the pooling layers IS adding complex to the simple input feature set. Therefore the comparison should be of only state of the art ML.