Handling Invalid Pixels in Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Most neural networks use a normal convolutional layer that assumes that all input pixels are valid pixels. However, pixels added to the input through padding result in adding extra information that was not initially present. This extra information can be considered invalid. Invalid pixels can also be inside the image where they are referred to as holes in completion tasks like image inpainting. In this work, we look for a method that can handle both types of invalid pixels. We compare on the same test bench two methods previously used to handle invalid pixels outside the image (Partial and Edge convolutions) and one method that was designed for invalid pixels inside the image (Gated convolution). We show that Partial convolution performs the best in image classification while Gated convolution has the advantage on semantic segmentation. As for hotel recognition with masked regions, none of the methods seem appropriate to generate embeddings that leverage the masked regions.