In addition to discrete convolutions themselves, pooling operations make up another important building block in CNNs. Pooling operations reduce the size of feature maps by using some function to summarize subregions, such as taking the average or the maximum value.
Pooling works by sliding a window across the input and feeding the content of the window to a pooling function. In some sense, pooling works very much like a discrete convolution, but replaces the linear combination described by the kernel with some other function.