CNN Exercises

Question 1: Manual Convolution

In this exercise, your task is to implement a function that performs a 2D convolution operation manually on a 3D input image using a given 3D kernel.

The input is a tensor with dimensions [channels, height, width] and the kernel is a tensor with dimensions [channels, kH, kW]. Your goal is to produce an output tensor of shape [height - kH + 1, width - kW + 1] by applying the convolution operation. Recall that output element is computed as the sum of the element-wise multiplication of the kernel and the corresponding patch of the input image.

fconv2d <- function(image, kernel, bias) {
  ...
}

You can use the code below to check your implementation against the conv2d module from the torch package.

library(torch)
conv <- nn_conv2d(3, 1, kernel_size = c(3, 3))
kernel <- conv$parameters$weight
bias <- conv$parameters$bias

input <- torch_randn(1, 3, 28, 28)
torch_allclose(
  fconv2d(input$squeeze(), kernel$squeeze(), bias$squeeze()),
  conv(input),
  atol = 1e-5
)

[1] TRUE

Hint

Allocate a new empty tensor of the correct size to store the output.
Using a nested loop, iterate over each valid spatial location in the input and multiply the corresponding patch of the input with the kernel (torch_sum(patch * kernel)) and add the bias.

Question 2: Be edgey

Construct a convolutional 2x2 kernel that extracts the edges of an image. Apply it using the fconv2d function from the previous exercise.

As an input, we use an image from MNIST. You can use the plot_2d_image function from the helper script to plot the image.

library(torchvision)
source(here::here("scripts/helper.R"))
mnist <- mnist_dataset(root = "data", download = TRUE)
image <- mnist$.getitem(13)$x
plot_2d_image(image)

To get started, use the code below and modify the values of the kernel.

kernel <- matrix(c(0.53, 0.34, 0.22, 0.1), byrow = TRUE, nrow = 2)
kernel

     [,1] [,2]
[1,] 0.53 0.34
[2,] 0.22 0.10

kernel <- torch_tensor(kernel)$unsqueeze(1)

imageout <- fconv2d(torch_tensor(image)$unsqueeze(1), kernel, 0)
plot_2d_image(imageout$squeeze())