What is: Hierarchical-Split Block?

Hierarchical-Split Block is a representational block for multi-scale feature representations. It contains many hierarchical split and concatenate connections within one single residual block.

Specifically, ordinary feature maps in deep neural networks are split into $s$ groups, each with $w$ channels. As shown in the Figure, only the first group of filters can be straightly connected to next layer. The second group of feature maps are sent to a convolution of $3 \times 3$ filters to extract features firstly, then the output feature maps are split into two sub-groups in the channel dimension. One sub-group of feature maps straightly connected to next layer, while the other sub-group is concatenated with the next group of input feature maps in the channel dimension. The concatenated feature maps are operated by a set of $3 \times 3$ convolutional filters. This process repeats several times until the rest of input feature maps are processed. Finally, features maps from all input groups are concatenated and sent to another layer of $1 \times 1$ filters to rebuild the features.