In numpy terms I think this is what you are doing:
In [104]: A = np.arange(2*3*3).reshape(2,3,3)
In [105]: B = np.arange(2*4*4).reshape(2,4,4)
In [106]: C = np.array([np.kron(a,b) for a,b in zip(A,B)])
In [107]: C.shape
Out[107]: (2, 12, 12)
That treats the initial dimension, the 2, as a batch. One obvious generalization is to reshape the arrays, reducing the higher dimensions to 1, e.g. reshape(-1,3,3), etc. And then afterwards, reshape C back to the desired n-dimensions.
np.kron does accept 3d (and higher), but it's doing some sort of outer on the shared 2 dimension:
In [108]: np.kron(A,B).shape
Out[108]: (4, 12, 12)
And visualizing that 4 dimension as (2,2), I can take the diagonal and get your C:
In [109]: np.allclose(np.kron(A,B)[[0,3]], C)
Out[109]: True
The full kron does more calculations than needed, but is still faster:
In [110]: timeit C = np.array([np.kron(a,b) for a,b in zip(A,B)])
108 µs ± 2.23 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10,000 loops each)
In [111]: timeit np.kron(A,B)[[0,3]]
76.4 µs ± 1.36 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10,000 loops each)
I'm sure it's possible to do your calculation in a more direct way, but doing that requires a better understanding of how the kron works. A quick glance as the np.kron code suggest that is does an outer(A,B)
In [114]: np.outer(A,B).shape
Out[114]: (18, 32)
which has the same number of elements, but it then reshapes and concatenates to produce the kron layout.
But following a hunch, I found that this is equivalent to what you want:
In [123]: D = A[:,:,None,:,None]*B[:,None,:,None,:]
In [124]: np.allclose(D.reshape(2,12,12),C)
Out[124]: True
In [125]: timeit np.reshape(A[:,:,None,:,None]*B[:,None,:,None,:],(2,12,12))
14.3 µs ± 184 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100,000 loops each)
That is easily generalized to more leading dimensions.
def my_kron(A,B):
D = A[...,:,None,:,None]*B[...,None,:,None,:]
ds = D.shape
newshape = (*ds[:-4],ds[-4]*ds[-3],ds[-2]*ds[-1])
return D.reshape(newshape)
In [137]: my_kron(A.reshape(1,2,1,3,3),B.reshape(1,2,1,4,4)).shape
Out[137]: (1, 2, 1, 12, 12)