Missing tool in Deep Learning: data augmentation with geometrical landmarks - tensorflow

Data augmentation can easily be achieved using ad hoc modules in e.g. TensorFlow. This works perfectly for classification problems, however when the objective of the network is the prediction of a geometrical feature, e.g. a landmark, a problem arises. As the image is modified, e.g. flipped, or distorted, the corresponding labels also need to be adapted.
1 - Is there any tool to do this? I am sure that this is a common problem.
2 - Would it be useful to create a data augmentation script for neural networks that predict geometrical features?
I want to understand if I need to code all of this by myself or if I am missing something that already exists. If I need to do it and it could be useful I would just create an open source thing.

You can use imgaug library https://github.com/aleju/imgaug
An example of augmentation for key points using imgaug you can find here https://github.com/aleju/imgaug#example-augment-images-and-keypoints

Related

How does custom object detection actually work?

I am currently testing out custom object detection using the Tensorflow API. But I don't quite seem to understand the theory behind it.
So if I for example download a version of MobileNet and use it to train on, lets say, red and green apples. Does it forget all the things that is has already been trained on? And if so, why does it then benefit to use MobileNet over building a CNN from scratch.
Thanks for any answers!
Does it forget all the things that is has already been trained on?
Yes, if you re-train a CNN previously trained on a large database with a new database containing fewer classes it will "forget" the old classes. However, the old pre-training can help learning the new classes, this is a training strategy called "transfert learning" of "fine tuning" depending on the exact approach.
As a rule of thumb it is generally not a good idea to create a new network architecture from scratch as better networks probably already exist. You may want to implement your custom architecture if:
You are learning CNN's and deep learning
You have a specific need and you proved that other architectures won't fit or will perform poorly
Usually, one take an existing pre-trained network and specialize it for their specific task using transfert learning.
A lot of scientific literature is available for free online if you want to learn. you can start with the Yolo series and R-CNN, Fast-RCNN and Faster-RCNN for detection networks.
The main concept behind object detection is that it divides the input image in a grid of N patches, and then for each patch, it generates a set of sub-patches with different aspect ratios, let's say it generates M rectangular sub-patches. In total you need to classify MxN images.
In general the idea is then analyze each sub-patch within each patch . You pass the sub-patch to the classifier in your model and depending on the model training, it will classify it as containing a green apple/red apple/nothing. If it is classified as a red apple, then this sub-patch is the bounding box of the object detected.
So actually, there are two parts you are interested in:
Generating as many sub-patches as possible to cover as many portions of the image as possible (Of course, the more sub-patches, the slower your model will be) and,
The classifier. The classifier is normally an already exisiting network (MobileNeet, VGG, ResNet...). This part is commonly used as the "backbone" and it will extract the features of the input image. With the classifier you can either choose to training it "from zero", therefore your weights will be adjusted to your specific problem, OR, you can load the weigths from other known problem and use them in your problem so you won't need to spend time training them. In this case, they will also classify the objects for which the classifier was training for.
Take a look at the Mask-RCNN implementation. I find very interesting how they explain the process. In this architecture, you will not only generate a bounding box but also segment the object of interest.

Image Detection & Classification - general approach?

I'm trying to build a detection + classification model that will recognize an object in an image and classify it. Every image will contain at most 1 object among my 10 classes (i.e. same image cannot contains 2 classes). An image can, however, contain none of my classes/objects. I'm struggling with the general approach to this problem, especially due to the nature of my problem; my objects have different sizes. This is what I have tried:
Trained a classifier with images that only contains my objects/classes, i.e. every image is the object itself with background pre-removed. Now, since the objects/images have different shapes (aspect ratios) I had to reshape the images to the same size (destroying the aspect ratios). This would work just fine if my purpose was to only build a classifier, but since I also need to detect the objects, this didn't work so good.
The second approach was similar to (1), except that I didn't reshape the objects naively, but kept the aspect ratios by padding the image with 0 (black). This completely destroyed my classifiers ability to perform well (accuracy < 5%).
Mask RCNN - I followed this blogpost to try build a detector + classifier in the same model. The approach took forever and I wasn't sure it was the right approach. I even used external tools (RectLabel) to generate annotated image files containing information about the bounding boxes.
Question:
How should I approach this problem, on a general level:
Should I build 2 separate models? (One for detection/localization and one for classification?)
Should I be annotating my images using annotations file as in approach (3)?
Do I have to reshape my images at any stage?
Thanks,
PS. In all of my approaches, I augmented the images to generate ~500-1000 images per class.
To answer your questions:
No, you don't have to build two separate models. What you are describing is called Object detection, which is classification along with localization. There are many models which do this: Mask_RCNN, Yolo, Detectron, SSD, etc..
Yes, you do need to annotate your images for training a model for your custom classes. Each of the models mentioned above has needs a different way of annotation.
No, you don't need to do any image resizing. Most of the time it is done when the model loads the data for training or inference.
You are on the right track with trying MaskRCNN.
Other than MaskRCNN, you could also try Yolo. There is also an accompanying easy-to-use annotating tool Yolo-Mark.
If you go through this tutorial, you would understand what you care about.
How to train your own Object Detector with TensorFlow’s Object Detector API
The SSD model is small so that it would not take so much time for training.
There are some object detection models.
On RectLabel, you can save bounding boxes in the PASCAL VOC format.
You can export TFRecord for Tensorflow.
https://rectlabel.com/help#tf_record

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.

Object detection project (root architecture) using Tensorflow + Keras. Image sample size for accurate training of model?

Im currenty working on a project at University, where we are using python + tensorflow and keras to train an image object detector, to detect different parts of the root system of Arabidopsis.
Our current ressults are pretty bad, as we do only have about 100 images to train the model with at this moment, but we are currently working on cultuvating more plants in order to get more images(more data) to train the tensorflow model.
We have implemented the following Mask_RCNN model:Github- Mask_RCNN tensorflow
We are looking to detect three object clases: stem, main root and secondary root.
But the model detects main roots incorrectly where the secondary roots are located.
It should be able to detect something like this:Root detection example
Training root data set that we are using right now:training images
What is the usual sample size that is used to train a neural network accurate results?
First off: I think there is no simple rule to estimate the sample size but at least it depends on:
1. Quality of your images
I downloaded the images and I think you need to preprocess them before you can use it to reduce the "problem complexity". In some projects, in which I worked with biological data, a background removal (image - low pass filter) was the key to get better results. But you should definitely remove/crop the area outside the region of your interest (like the tape and the ruler). I would try to get the cleanest data set as possible (including manually adjustments cv2/ gimp/ etc.) to focus the network to solve "the right problem".. After that you could apply some random distortion to make it also work on fuzzy/bad/realistic images as well.
2. The way you work with your data
There are a few tricks that enables you to "expand" your dataset.
Sometimes it's very helpful to let a generator method crop random small patches from your input data. This allows you to work with more batches (on small gpus) and gives your network more "variety", (just think about the conv2d task: if you don't use random cropping your filters will slide over the same areas over and over again (at the same image)). Because of the same reason: apply random distortion, flip and rotate your images.
3. Network architecture
In your case I would prefer a U-Net architecture with a last conv2d output of 3 (your classes) feature maps, a final softmax activation and an categorical_crossentropy, this enables you to play with the depth, because sometimes you need sophisticated architectures to solve a problem (close to 100%) but in your case you just want to see a first working result. So fewer layers and a simple architecture could also help you to get things work. Maybe there are some trained network weights for a U-Net which meets your requirements (search on kaggle for example). Because it is also helpful (to reduce the data you need) to use "transfer learning" -> use the first layers of an network (weights) which is already trained. Using a semantic segmentation the first filters will become something like an edge detection for the most given problems/images.
4. Your mental model of "accurate results"
This is the hardest part.. because it evolves during your project. Eg. in the same moment your networks starts to perform well on preprocessed input images you will start to think about architecture/data changes to make it work on fuzzy images as well. This is why you should start with a feasible problem but always improve your dataset (including rare kinds of roots) and tune your network architecture step by step.

Object detection using CNTK

I am very new to CNTK.
I wanted to train a set of images (to detect objects like alcohol glasses/bottles) using CNTK - ResNet/Fast-R CNN.
I am trying to follow below documentation from GitHub; However, it does not appear to be a straight forward procedure. https://github.com/Microsoft/CNTK/wiki/Object-Detection-using-Fast-R-CNN
I cannot find proper documentation to generate ROI's for the images with different sizes and shapes. And how to create object labels based on the trained models? Can someone point out to a proper documentation or training link using which I can work on the cntk model? Please see the attached image in which I was able to load a sample image with default ROI's in the script. How do I properly set the size and label the object in the image ? Thanks in advance!
sample image loaded for training
Not sure what you mean by proper documentation. This is an implementation of the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.08083.pdf). Looks like you are trying to generate ROI's. Can you look through the helper functions as documented at the site to parse what you might need:
To run the toy example, make sure that in PARAMETERS.py the datasetName is set to "grocery".
Run A1_GenerateInputROIs.py to generate the input ROIs for training and testing.
Run A2_RunCntk_py3.py to train a Fast R-CNN model using the CNTK Python API and compute test results.
The algo will work on several candidate regions and then generate outputs: one for the classes of objects and another one that generates the bounding boxes for the objects belonging to those classes. Please refer to the code for getting the details of the implementation.
Can someone point out to a proper documentation or training link using which I can work on the cntk model?
You can take a look at my repository on GitHub.
It will guide you through all the steps required to train your own model for object detection and classification with CNTK.
But in short the proper steps should look something like this:
Setup environment
Prepare data
Tag images (ground truth)
Download pretrained model and create mappings for your custom dataset
Run training
Evaluate the model on test set