Deconvolutional layers have been widely used in a variety of deep
 models for up-sampling, including encoder-decoder networks for
 semantic segmentation and deep generative models for unsupervised
 learning. One of the key limitations of deconvolutional operations
 is that they result in the so-called checkerboard problem. This is
 caused by the fact that no direct relationship exists among adjacent
 pixels on the output feature map. To address this problem, we
 propose the pixel deconvolutional layer (PixelDCL) to establish
 direct relationships among adjacent pixels on the up-sampled feature
 map. Our method is based on a fresh interpretation of the regular
 deconvolution operation. The resulting PixelDCL can be used to
 replace any deconvolutional layer in a plug-and-play manner without
 compromising the fully trainable capabilities of original models.
 The proposed PixelDCL may result in slight decrease in efficiency,
 but this can be overcome by an implementation trick. Experimental
 results on semantic segmentation demonstrate that PixelDCL can
 consider spatial features such as edges and shapes and yields more
 accurate segmentation outputs than deconvolutional layers. When used
 in image generation tasks, our PixelDCL can largely overcome the
 checkerboard problem suffered by regular deconvolution operations.
Solve checkerboard problem in Deconvolutional layer by building dependencies between pixels This work proposes pixel deconvolutional layers for convolutional neural networks as a way to alleviate the checkerboard effect. A novel technique to generalize deconvolution operations used in standard CNN architectures, which proposes doing sequential prediction of adjacent pixel features, resulting in more spatially smooth outputs for deconvolution layers.