Filters in convolutional networks are typically parameterized in a pixel
basis, that does not take prior knowledge about the visual world into account.
We investigate the generalized notion of frames designed with image properties
in mind, as alternatives to this parametrization. We show that frame-based
ResNets and Densenets can improve performance on Cifar-10+ consistently, while
having additional pleasant properties like steerability. By exploiting these
transformation properties explicitly, we arrive at dynamic steerable blocks.
They are an extension of residual blocks, that are able to seamlessly transform
filters under pre-defined transformations, conditioned on the input at training
and inference time. Dynamic steerable blocks learn the degree of invariance
from data and locally adapt filters, allowing them to apply a different
geometrical variant of the same filter to each location of the feature map.
When evaluated on the Berkeley Segmentation contour detection dataset, our
approach outperforms all competing approaches that do not utilize pre-training.
Our results highlight the benefits of image-based regularization to deep
networks