Keras -- Transfer learning -- changing Input tensor shape This post seems to indicate that what I want to accomplish is not possible. However, I'm not convinced of this -- given what I've already done, I don't see why what I want to do can not be achieved...

I have two image datasets where one has images of shape (480, 720, 3) while the other has images of shape (540, 960, 3).

I initialized a model using the following code:

input = Input(shape=(480, 720, 3), name='image_input')

initial_model = VGG16(weights='imagenet', include_top=False)

for layer in initial_model.layers:
    layer.trainable = False

x = Flatten()(initial_model(input))
x = Dense(1000, activation='relu')(x)
x = BatchNormalization()(x)
x = Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = Dense(1000, activation='relu')(x)
x = BatchNormalization()(x)
x = Dropout(0.5)(x)
x = Dense(14, activation='linear')(x)

model = Model(inputs=input, outputs=x)
model.compile(loss='mse', optimizer='adam', metrics=['mae'])


Now that I've trained this model on the former dataset, I'd like to pop the input tensor layer off and prepend the model with a new input tensor with a shape that matches the image dimensions of the latter dataset.

model = load_model('path/to/my/trained/model.h5')
old_input = model.pop(0)
new_input = Input(shape=(540, 960, 3), name='image_input')
x = model(new_input)
m = Model(inputs=new_input, outputs=x)
m.save('transfer_model.h5')


which yields this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  File "/home/aicg2/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/keras/engine/topology.py", line 2506, in save
    save_model(self, filepath, overwrite, include_optimizer)
  File "/home/aicg2/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/keras/models.py", line 106, in save_model
    'config': model.get_config()
  File "/home/aicg2/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/keras/engine/topology.py", line 2322, in get_config
    layer_config = layer.get_config()
  File "/home/aicg2/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/keras/engine/topology.py", line 2370, in get_config
    new_node_index = node_conversion_map[node_key]
KeyError: u'image_input_ib-0'


In the post that I linked, maz states that there is a dimension mismatch that prevents changing the input layer of a model -- if this was the case, then how is that I put a (480, 720, 3) input layer in front of the VGG16 model which expects (224, 224, 3) images? 

I think a more likely issue is that my former model's output is expecting something different than what I'm giving it based on what fchollet is saying in this post. I'm syntactically confused, but I believe the whole x = Layer()(x) segment is constructing the layer piece by piece from input->output and simply throwing a different input in front is breaking it.

I really have no idea though...

Can somebody please enlighten me how to accomplish what I'm trying to do or, if it's not possible, explain to me why not?
You can do this by creating a new VGG16 model instance with the new input shape new_shape and copying over all the layer weights. The code is roughly

new_model = VGG16(weights=None, input_shape=new_shape, include_top=False)
for new_layer, layer in zip(new_model.layers[1:], model.layers[1:]):
    new_layer.set_weights(layer.get_weights())