Atrous convolution

1. What is an atrous convolution?
2. What are dilated or atrous convolutions?
3. Why do we use dilated convolution?

What is an atrous convolution?

Atrous convolution is an alternative for the down sampling layer. It increases the receptive field whilst maintains the spatial dimension of feature maps.

What are dilated or atrous convolutions?

Dilated convolutions or atrous convolutions, previously described for wavelet analysis without signal decimation, expands window size without increasing the number of weights by inserting zero-values into convolution kernels.

Why do we use dilated convolution?

Dilated convolution helps expand the area of the input image covered without pooling. The objective is to cover more information from the output obtained with every convolution operation. This method offers a wider field of view at the same computational cost.