CNN - Do we need to manually preprocess training images? - tensorflow

Am a complete noob and I just want to ask, do we need to preprocess images (like manually) before feeding the image into CNN for training? I've read that CNN already has some filtering techniques to extract features and such. I'm thinking what if all the train images are binary images or even just edges (teaching the model for shapes), is it advisable or I'll just feed grayscale images? Additionally, if the answer is yes, may I know what kind of preparation is done normally or what you would use?
I am aware of the other preprocessing techniques by Keras, such as the VGG16, but I would like something simple and manual.

The preprocessing functions of Keras only preprocess the input according to the state-of-the-art models requirements, e.g., changing the data format etc. May be, what you are talking about is hand-engineered features, which is not simple. And I think, it's not advisable because CNN does a better job. But it may also depend on what you actually want to do.

Related

How to create a dataset for image classification

I trained a model using images I gathered from the web. Then, when inferences were made using images newly collected from the web, performance was poor.
I am wondering how I can improve my dataset using misclassified images. Can I add all the misclassified images to the training dataset? And then do I have to collect new images?
[Edit]
I added some of the misclassified images to the training dataset, although the performance evaluation got better.
It might be worth if you could provide more info on how you trained your model, and your network architecture.
However this are some general guidelines:
You can try to diversify your images in your train set by, yes, adding new images. The more different examples you provide to your network, the higher the chance that they will be similar to images you want to obtain prediction from.
Do data augmentation, it is pretty straightforward and usually improves quite a bit the accuracy. You can have a look at this Tensorflow tutorial for Data Augmentation. If you don’t know what data augmentation is, basically is a technique to perform minor changes to your images, that is by rotating the image a bit, resizing etc. This way the model is trained to learn your images even with slight changes, which usually makes it more robust to new images.
You could consider doing Transfer Learning. The main idea here is to leverage a model that has learned on a huge dataset and use it to fine-tune your specific problem. In the tutorial I linked they show the typical workflow of transfer learning, by taking a model pretrained on the ImageNet dataset (the huge dataset), and retraining it on the Kaggle "cats vs dogs" classification dataset (a smaller dataset, like the one you could have).

Image Detector with tensorflow

I want to build a simple image detector for custom Binary shapes on images.
I may train and use the models on object detection zoo such as ssd_inception_v2 and so on. But it's would be extremely un efficient as it has sizes in hundreds of Megabytes.
and I can't even imagine to use that in my simple app. can anybody suggest me how to solve this?
I have already built excellent small size classifiers for my images. but can't build small scale efficient detector. (their position with detection boxes)
I think what you need is transfer learning. I would take one of the lightweight models such as MobileNetV2 and retrain on my dataset. It should be pretty quick.If you want to even decrease your model size further, feel free to only take the first few layers of the CNN and retrain it. It would be a bit more work since you need to re-write the part of network you want to use and load it with the pre-trained weights.

How to use google inception model to classify DNA or protein sequences data sets?

I tried to classify protein using its sequences into their families. Can I use deep convolutional models on this purpose even though they use RGB 3 input metrics of an image? Is there any specific way to convert dataset other than the image in order to classify using these models. I'm new to Artificial neural networks, your suggestions are highly appreciated.
First you need to understand that the models you have in mind are tasked with a very difficult problem: Object Recognition in colored images therefore the models used are very big.
Then you need to know the purpose of using CNNs, is to extract as many features as we can from colored images in order to perform detection.
With the knowledge above considered I think classifying protein using its sequences seems achievable with a much more smaller convolutional model. You may need at max 10 layers of convolution. To conclude you should not need a CNN as complex as google inception model.
About your data: There is no rule about CNNs which say you can only use RGB pictures. These pictures are only arrays. If you have any kind of numeric data which can be used in algorithmic operations ofcourse, you can definitely use CNNs for feature extraction. I recommend you to take a look at this example.
I also recommend you to take a look at the following libraries. SK-LEARN, KERAS and PYTORCH. These libraries are very begginer friendly and they have amazing documentaries.
Best of luck.

How to know what Tensorflow actually "see"?

I'm using cnn built by keras(tensorflow) to do visual recognition.
I wonder if there is a way to know what my own tensorflow model "see".
Google had a news showing the cat face in the AI brain.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/one-step-closer-to-a-brain-79159265/
Can anybody tell me how to take out the image in my own cnn networks.
For example, what my own cnn model recognize a car?
We have to distinguish between what Tensorflow actually see:
As we go deeper into the network, the feature maps look less like the
original image and more like an abstract representation of it. As you
can see in block3_conv1 the cat is somewhat visible, but after that it
becomes unrecognizable. The reason is that deeper feature maps encode
high level concepts like “cat nose” or “dog ear” while lower level
feature maps detect simple edges and shapes. That’s why deeper feature
maps contain less information about the image and more about the class
of the image. They still encode useful features, but they are less
visually interpretable by us.
and what we can reconstruct from it as a result of some kind of reverse deconvolution (which is not a real math deconvolution in fact) process.
To answer to your real question, there is a lot of good example solution out there, one you can study it with success: Visualizing output of convolutional layer in tensorflow.
When you are building a model to perform visual recognition, you actually give it similar kinds of labelled data or pictures in this case to it to recognize so that it can modify its weights according to the training data. If you wish to build a model that can recognize a car, you have to perform training on a large train data containing labelled pictures. This type of recognition is basically a categorical recognition.
You can experiment with the MNIST dataset which provides with a dataset of pictures of digits for image recognition.

Tensorflow - How to ignore certain labels

I'm trying to implement a fully convolutional network and train it on the Pascal VOC dataset, however after reading up on the labels in the set, I see that I need to somehow ignore the "void" label. In Caffe their softmax function has an argument to ignore labels, so I'm wondering what the mechanic is, so I can implement something similar in tensorflow.
Thanks
In tensorflow you're feeding the data in feed_dict right? Generally you'd want to just pre-process the data and remove the unwanted samples - don't give them to tensorflow for processing.
My prefered approach is a producer-consumer model where you fire up a tensorflow queue and load it with samples from a loader thread which just skips enqueuing your void samples.
In training your model dequeue samples in the model (you don't use feed_dict in the optimize step). This way you're not bothering to write out a whole new dataset with the specific preprocessing step you're interested in today (tomorrow you're likely to find you want to do some other preprocessing step).
As a side comment, I think tensorflow is a little more do-it-yourself than some other frameworks. But I tend to like that, it abstracts enough to be convenient, but not so much that you don't understand what's happening. When you implement it you understand it, that's the motto that comes to mind with tensorflow.