README.md

Analysis and Applications of Multi-Scale CNN Feature Maps

The goal of this repo and its corresponding blogpost is to provide a deeper insight into the intuitions behind the use cases of multi-scale convolutional feature maps in the recent proposed CNN architectures for variety of vision tasks. Therefore, this project can be treated as a tutorial to learn more about how different types of layers impact the spatial scales and receptive fields of feature maps. Also, this repo could be used by those engineers and researchers that are involved in designing CNN architectures and are tired of blind trial and error of which feature maps to choose from a CNN backbone to improve the performance of their models, and instead, prefer from the early steps of design process, to match the spatial scale profiles of feature maps with the object dimensions in training datasets.

Diagram of spatial scale formula for 2 x 2 pooling layers. The green rectangle denotes the input image; the brown rectangle denotes the input feature map to the pooling later and the output feature map of the pooling layer is denoted by the blue rectangle. The spatial scale of the orange output entry is the union of the 4 regions marked on the input image which are corresponding to the spatial scales of the 4 neighboring input feature map entries.

Features

The module that implements the functionalities of computing spatial scales and overlaps for different layers is spatial.py. In order to compute the spatial scale profile for a CNN, first, you need to construct its layer configuration list and then pass it to the process method of spatial.py. You can use the ResNet-50 (the method resnet_50 in spatial.py) as an example to create your own layer configuration.

Spatial scale profile of ResNet-50.

As of now, the spatial scale and overlap of the following layers have been added to this repo: 3x3 convolutional layer with stride 1, 2x2 pooling layer with stride 2, 3x3 convolutional layer with stride 2, 3x3 pooling layer with stride 2, 1x1 convolutional layer with stride 2, 1x1 convolutional layer with stride 1 and dilated 3x3 convolutional layer with stride 1 and dilation rate of 2.