Salient Deconvolutional Networks

Aravindh Mahendran, Andrea Vedaldi

Abstract: Deconvolution is a popular method for visualizing deep convolutional neural networks; however, due to their heuristic nature, the meaning of deconvolutional visualizations is not entirely clear. In this paper, we introduce a family of reversed networks that generalizes and relates deconvolution, backpropagation and network saliency. We use this construction to thoroughly investigate and compare these methods in terms of quality and meaning of the produced images, and of what architectural choices are important in determining these properties. We also show an application of these generalized deconvolutional networks to weakly-supervised foreground object segmentation.