Standalone image patch extraction op in Tensorflow
<p>In the <a href="https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.8/api_docs/python/nn.html#conv2d" rel="nofollow">Tensorflow docs</a>, the <code>tf.nn.conv2d</code>-operation is described to:</p>

<ol>
<li>Flatten the filter to a 2-D matrix with shape <code>[filter_height * filter_width * in_channels, output_channels]</code>.</li>
<li>Extract image patches from the input tensor to form a virtual tensor of shape <code>[batch, out_height, out_width, filter_height * filter_width * in_channels]</code>.</li>
<li>For each patch, right-multiply the filter matrix and the image patch vector.</li>
</ol>

<p>Is there an operation to apply <em>just</em> step 2? I cannot find anything like that in the API docs. I might be searching with the wrong keywords.</p>