By systematically reducing the size of the input volume, through convolution and pooling, the network should create representations of small parts of the input, and then from them assemble representations of larger areas. The final pooling layer is flattened to serve as input to a hidden layer, such that each neuron in the final pooling layer is connected to every single neuron in the hidden layer. This then serves as input to the output layer, e.g. a softmax output for classification.