Why using PowerLayer for identity mapping?

[yijunCai]

Hi @sanghoon
I notice that for short-cut connections, A PowerLayer is used for identity mapping（since both power and scale are set to 1） as follows:

layer {
name: "conv2_3/input"
type: "Power"
bottom: "conv2_2"
top: "conv2_3/input"
power_param {
power: 1
scale: 1
shift: 0
}
}
layer {
name: "conv2_3"
type: "Eltwise"
bottom: "conv2_3/3"
bottom: "conv2_3/input"
top: "conv2_3"
eltwise_param {
operation: SUM
coeff: 1
coeff: 1
}
}

I'm wondering if "conv2_3/input" is neccessary. Why not take "conv2_2" directly as bottom input for "conv2_3"?

[xiaoxiongli]

i think you can.

[sanghoon]

You can exclude the redundant Power layers.
I've added them so that I can easily generate the prototxt with my own script,
but they do nothing.

[zimenglan-sysu-512]

@sanghoon can you share your script which to generate the prototxt? thanks.