CARAFE: Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures

Feature upsampling is a key operation in a number of modern convolutional network architectures, e.g. feature pyramids. Its design is critical for dense prediction tasks such as object detection and semantic/instance segmentation. In this work, we propose Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures (CARAFE), a universal, lightweight and highly effective operator to fulfill this goal. CARAFE has several appealing properties: (1) Large field of view. Unlike previous works (e.g. bilinear interpolation) that only exploit subpixel neighborhood, CARAFE can aggregate contextual information within a large receptive field. (2) Content-aware handling. Instead of using a fixed kernel for all samples (e.g. deconvolution), CARAFE…