Passing output of 3DCNN layer to LSTM layer - tensorflow

Question

Whilst trying to learn Recurrent Neural Networks(RNNs) am trying to train an Automatic Lip Reading Model using 3DCNN + LSTM. I tried out a code I found for the same on Kaggle.
model = Sequential()
# 1st layer group
model.add(Conv3D(32, (3, 3, 3), strides = 1, input_shape=(22, 100, 100, 1), activation='relu', padding='valid'))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
model.add(Conv3D(64, (3, 3, 3), activation='relu', strides=1))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
model.add(Conv3D(128, (3, 3, 3), activation='relu', strides=1))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
shape = model.get_output_shape_at(0)
model.add(Reshape((shape[-1],shape[1]*shape[2]*shape[3])))
# LSTMS - Recurrent Network Layer
model.add(LSTM(32, return_sequences=True))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add((Flatten()))
# # FC layers group
model.add(Dense(2048, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add(Dense(1024, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add(Dense(10, activation='softmax'))
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='Adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
model.summary()
However, it returns the following error:
11 model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
12
---> 13 shape = model.get_output_shape_at(0)
14 model.add(Reshape((shape[-1],shape[1]*shape[2]*shape[3])))
15
RuntimeError: The layer sequential_2 has never been called and thus has no defined output shape.
From my understanding, I see that the author of the code was trying to get the output shape of the first layer and reshape it such as to forward to the LSTM layer.
Found a similar post following which I made the following changes and the error was fixed.
shape = model.layers[-1].output_shape
# shape = model.get_output_shape_at(0)
Still I am confused as to what the code does to forward the input from the CNN layer to LSTM layer. Any help to make me understand the above is appreciated. Thank You!!

Answer 1

When you are passing the code from top to bottom then the inputs are flowing in the graph from top to bottom, you are getting this error because you can't call this function on eager mode, as Tensorflow 2.0 is fully transferred to eager mode, so, once you will fit the function and train it 1 epoch then you can use model.get_output_at(0) otherwise use mode.layers[-1].output.
The CNN Layer will extract the features locally then LSTM will sequentially extract and learn the feature, using CONV with LSTM is a good approach, but I will recommend you directly using tf.keras.layers.ConvLSTM3D. Check it here https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras/layers/ConvLSTM3D
tf.keras.backend.clear_session()
model = Sequential()
# 1st layer group
model.add(Conv3D(32, (3, 3, 3), strides = 1, input_shape=(22, 100, 100, 1), activation='relu', padding='valid'))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
model.add(Conv3D(64, (3, 3, 3), activation='relu', strides=1))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
model.add(Conv3D(128, (3, 3, 3), activation='relu', strides=1))
model.add(MaxPooling3D(pool_size=(2, 2, 2), strides=2))
shape = model.layers[-1].output_shape
model.add(Reshape((shape[-1],shape[1]*shape[2]*shape[3])))
# LSTMS - Recurrent Network Layer
model.add(LSTM(32, return_sequences=True))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add((Flatten()))
# # FC layers group
model.add(Dense(2048, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add(Dense(1024, activation='relu'))
model.add(Dropout(.5))
model.add(Dense(10, activation='softmax'))
model.compile(loss='categorical_crossentropy', optimizer='Adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
model.summary()