Deconvolution2D layer in keras

Question

This layer in not ready documented very well and I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out exactly how to use it.
I'm Trying something like:

input_img = Input(shape=(1, h, w))
x = Convolution2D(16, 7, 7, activation='relu', border_mode='valid')(input_img)
d = Deconvolution2D(1, 7, 7, (None, 1, 2*h, 2*w))
x = d(x)

but when I try to write d.output_shape, I get the original shape of the image instead of twice that size (which is what I was expecting).
Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Short answer: you need to add subsample=(2,2) to Deconvolution2D if you wish the output to truly be twice as large as the input.

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Longer answer: Deconvolution2D is severely undocumented and you have to go through its code to understand how to use it.

First, you must understand how the deconvolution layer works (skip this if you already know all the details). Deconvolution, unlike what its name suggest, is simply applying the back-propgation (gradient calculation method) of a standard convolution layer on the input to the deconvolution layer. The "kernel size" of the deconvolution layer is actually the kernel size of the virtual convolution layer of the backprop step mentioned above. While given the size of a convolution kernel and its stride, it is straightforward to compute the output shape of the convolution layer (assuming no padding it's (input - kernel) // stride + 1), but the reverse is not true. In fact, there can be more than one possible input shapes that matches a given output shape of the convolution layer (this is because integer division isn't invertible). This means that for a deconvolution layer, the output shape cannot be directly determined simply from the input shape (which is implicitly known), kernel size and stride - this is why we need to know the output shape when we initialize the layer. Of course, because of the way the deconvolution layer is defined, for some input shapes you'll get holes in its output which are undefined, and if we forbid these cases then we actually can deduce the output shape.

Back to Keras and how the above is implemented. Confusingly, the output_shape parameter is actually not used for determining the output shape of the layer, and instead they try to deduce it from the input, the kernel size and the stride, while assuming only valid output_shapes are supplied (though it's not checked in the code to be the case). The output_shape itself is only used as input to the backprop step. Thus, you must also specify the stride parameter (subsample in Keras) in order to get the desired result (which could've been determined by Keras from the given input shape, output shape and kernel size).