What are the uses of layers in keras/Tensorflow - tensorflow

So I am new to computer vision, and I do not really know what the layers do in keras. What is the use of adding layers (dense, Conv2D, etc) in keras? What do they add to it?

Convolution neural network has 4 main steps: Convolution, Pooling, Flatten, and Full connection.
Conv2D(), Conv3D(), etc. is for Feature extraction (It's a Convolution Layer).
Pooling layers (MaxPool2D(), AvgPool2D(), etc) is for Feature extraction as well (It has different operation though).
Flattening layers (Flatten() ) are to convert the extracted feature map into Vector before being fed into the Fully connection layers (The Dense layers).
Dense layers are for Fully connected step in Computer vision that acts as Classifier (The Neural network classify each extracted features from the Convolution layers.)
There are also optimization layers such as Dropout(), BatchNormalization(), etc.
For more information, just open the keras documentation.
If you want to start learning Convolution neural network, this article may help.

A layer in an Artificial Neural Network is a bunch of nodes bound together at a specific depth in a Neural Network. Keras is a high level API used over NN modules like TensorFlow or CNTK in order to simplify tasks. A Keras layer comprises 3 main parts:
Input Layer - Which contains the raw data
Hidden layer - Where the nodes of a layer learn some aspects about
the raw data which is input. It's similar to levels of abstraction
to form a Neural network.
Output Layer - Consists of a single output which is mostly a single
node and can be subjected to classification.
Keras, as a whole consists of many different types of layers. A Convolutional layer creates a kernel which is convoluted with the input over a single temporal space to derive a group of outputs. Pooling layers provide sampling of the feature maps by simplifying features in a map into patches. Max Pooling and Average Pooling are commonly used methods in a Pool layer.
Other commonly used layers in Keras are Embedding layers, Noise layers and Core layers. A single NN layer can represent only a Linearly seperable method. Most prediction problems are complicated and more than just one layer is required. This is where Multi Layer concept is required.
I think i clear your doubts and for any other queries you can see on https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/keras

Neural networks are a great tool nowadays to automate classification problems. However when it comes to computer vision the amount of input data is too great to be handled efficiently by simple neural networks.
To reduce the network workload, your data needs to be preprocessed and certain features need to be identified. To find features in images we can use certain filters (like sobel edge detection), which will highlight the essential features needed for classification.
Again the amount of filters required to classify one image is too great, and thus the selection of those filters needs to be automated.
That's where the convolutional layer comes in.
We use a convolutional layer to generate multiple random (at first) filters that will highlight certain features in an image. While the network is training those filters are optimized to do a better job at highlighting features.
In Tensorflow we use Conv2D() to add one of those layers. An example of parameters is : Conv2D(64, 3, activation='relu'). 64 denotes the number of filters used, 3 denotes the size of the filters (in this case 3x3) and activation='relu' denotes the activation function
After the convolutional layer we use a pooling layer to further highlight the features produced by the previous convolutional layer. In Tensorflow this is usually done with MaxPooling2D() which takes the filtered image and applies a 2x2 (by default) layer every 2 pixels. The filter applied by MaxPooling is basically looking for the maximum value in that 2x2 area and adds it in a new image.
We can use this set of convolutional layer and pooling layers multiple times to make the image easier for the network to work with.
After we are done with those layers, we need to pass the output to a conventional (Dense) neural network.
To do that, we first need to flatten the image data from a 2D Tensor(Matrix) to a 1D Tensor(Vector). This is done by calling the Flatten() method.
Finally we need to add our Dense layers which are used to train on the flattened data. We do this by calling Dense(). An example of parameters is Dense(64, activation='relu')
where 64 is the number of nodes we are using.
Here is an example CNN structure I used recently:
# Build model
model = tf.keras.models.Sequential()
# Convolution and pooling layers
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(64, 3, activation='relu', input_shape=(IMG_SIZE, IMG_SIZE, 1))) # Input layer
model.add(tf.keras.layers.MaxPooling2D())
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(64, 3, activation='relu'))
model.add(tf.keras.layers.MaxPooling2D())
# Flattened layers
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Flatten())
# Dense layers
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Dense(64, activation='relu'))
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Dense(2, activation='softmax')) # Output layer
Of course this worked for a certain classification problem and the number of layers and method parameters differ depending on the problem.
The Youtube channel The Coding Train has a very helpful video explaining the Convolutional and Pooling layer.

Related

Best way to add features after last convolutional layer, before fully-connected layers?

I am working on a regression problem related to chess. The output will depend on about 68 values that are given by Stockfish's static evaluation function (example output shown here), as well as the state of the board. However, the static eval features should not be passed through the CNN, only through the final fully-connected layers. Therefore I want to have some convolutional layers take the (one-hot encoded) board state down to a flat vector, then extend it with the other features before passing the full vector to a fully-connected layer.
How can I use Tensorflow to combine these two feature vectors (the result from the CNN and the other game-related features) within a single Layer type that can be added to a Sequential? I couldn't find anything that would handle this in the docs. Would subclassing Layer be the only way to go?

Purpose of pooling layer after text embedding layer

I'm following the tutorial on the tensorflow site (https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/text/word_embeddings#create_a_simple_model) to learn word embeddings, and a confusion that I have is about the purpose of having a Globalaveragepooling layer right after the embedding layer as follows:
model = keras.Sequential([
layers.Embedding(encoder.vocab_size, embedding_dim),
layers.GlobalAveragePooling1D(),
layers.Dense(16, activation='relu'),
layers.Dense(1)
])
I understand what pooling means and how it's done. If someone can explain why we need a pooling layer, and what would change if we didn't use it, I'd appreciate it.
The purpose of this tutorial is to get you to understand word-embeddings through a simple toy task: binary sentiment analysis.
To start with, they make you code a simple model: take the average of all embeddings in a sentence and add a feed-forward neural net to classify this aggregated input. GlobalAveragePooling1D does this averaging.
Obviously in the real world you'd want to use more complex models as RNNs, LSTMs, bidirectional models, atrous-convolution-based models or Transformers but that's not the point in this tutorial.
The "simple model" they mention being a feed-forward neural net, it expects a fixed input dimension so when you have sequential data of variable length you need to address this somehow: averaging, padding, cropping etc. Here they average with this GlobalAveragePooling1D layer

What is the difference between conv1d with kernel_size=1 and dense layer?

I am building a CNN with Conv1D layers, and it trains pretty well. I'm now looking into how to reduce the number of features before feeding it into a Dense layer at the end of the model, so I've been reducing the size of the Dense layer, but then I came across this article. The article talks about the effect of using a Conv2D filters with a kernel_size=(1,1) to reduce the number of features.
I was wondering what the difference is between using a Conv2D layer with kernel_size=(1,1) tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(filters=n,kernel_size=(1,1)) and using a Dense layer of the same size tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=n)? From my perspective (I'm relatively new to neural nets), a filter with kernel_size=(1,1) is a single number, which is essentially equivalent to weight in a Dense layer, and both layers have biases, so are they equivalent, or am I misunderstanding something? And if my understanding is correct, in my case where I am using Conv1D layers, not Conv2D layers, does that change anything? As in is tf.keras.layers.Conv1D(filters=n, kernel_size=1) equivalent to tf.keras.layers.Dense(units=n)?
Please let me know if you need anything from me to clarify the question. I'm mostly curious about if Conv1D layers with kernel_size=1 and Conv2D layers with kernel_size=(1,1) behave differently than Dense layers.
Yes, since Dense layer is applied on the last dimension of its input (see this answer), Dense(units=N) and Conv1D(filters=N, kernel_size=1) (or Dense(units=N) and Conv2D(filters=N, kernel_size=1)) are basically equivalent to each other both in terms of connections and number of trainable parameters.
In 1D CNN, the kernel moves in 1 direction. The input and output data of 1D CNN is 2 dimensional. Mostly used on Time-Series Data, Natural Language Processing tasks etc. Definitely gonna see people using it in Kaggle NLP competitions and notebooks.
In 2D CNN, the kernel moves in 2 directions. The input and output data of 2D CNN is 3 dimensional. Mostly used on Image data.
Definitely gonna see people using it in Kaggle CNN Image Processing competitions and notebooks
In 3D CNN, the kernel moves in 3 directions. The input and output data of 3D CNN is 4 dimensional. Mostly used on 3D Image data (MRI, CT Scans). Haven't personally seen applied version in competitions

Last fc layers in VGG16

The VGG16 architecture has input: 224x224x3 images.I want to have 48x48x3 inputs but to do this in keras, we remove the last fc layers which have 4096 neurons each.Why we have to do this? and is it needed to add another size of fc layers for this input?
Final pooling layer of VGG16 has dimension 7x7x512 for 224x224 input image. From there VGG16 uses fully connected layer of (7x7x512)x4096 to get 4096 dimensional output. However, since your input size is different your feature output dimension from final pooling layer will also be different (2x2x512 I think). So you need to change matrix dimension for fully connected layer to make it work. You have two other options though
use a global average pooling across spatial dimension to get 512 dimensional feature and then use few fully connected layers to get to your number of classes.
Resize you input image to 224x224x3 and you won't need to change anything in model architecture.
Removing the last FC layers is for fine-tuning or transfer learning, where you adapt an existing network to a new problem, such as changing the number of categories that your classifier can choose between.
You are adapting the network to take a different sized input, so you need to adjust the first layer(s) of the network.

Convolutional Autoencoders: Black Feature Maps

I am working with convolutional autoencoders. My autoenoder configuration has one convolutional layer with stride (2,2) or avg-pooling and relu activation and one deconvolutional layer with stride (2,2) or avg-unpooling and relu activation.
I trained the autoencoder with the MNIST data set.
When I am looking at the feature maps after the first convolutional layer (20 filters with filter size 3), I got some black feature maps instead the learned filters are not black. The same happens if I change the number of filters or the filter size.
I get this phenomena with TensorFlow and Theano autoencoders. (I did not test other neural network software yet.)
Does anyone know why this happens?
I can avoid the black feature maps when adding a LRN layer but I want to understand why the black feature maps appear.
I found the same phenomenon.
After training an convolutional autoencoder with 7x7x3x6 for thousands RGB images, two or three filters has some outputs, other filters gets zero outputs.
And the error does not decrease when they has too many zero output filters.
I also changed the filter numbers and sizes but results were almost the same.