Do input size effect mobilenet-ssd in aspect-ratio and real anchor ratio? (Tensorflow API) - tensorflow

im recently using tensorflow api object detection. The default SSD-MobileNet v1 is using 300 x 300 images as input training image, but i gonna edit the image size as width and height in different values. For instance, 320 * 180. Are aspects ratio in .config represent the real ratio of the anchors width/height ratio or they are just for the square images?

You can change the "size" to any different value , the general guidance is preserve the aspect ratio of the original image while the size can be different value.

Aspect ratios represent the real ratio of anchors. You can use it for different input ratios, but you will get the best result if you use input ratio similar to square images.

Related

Use of base anchor size in Single Shot Multi-box detector

I was digging in the Tensorflow Object Detection API in order to check out the anchor box generations for SSD architecture. In this py file where the anchor boxes are generated on the fly, I am unable to understand the usage of base_anchor_size. In the corresponding paper, there is no mention of such thing. Two questions in short:
What is the use of base_anchor_size parameter? Is it important?
How does this parameter affect the training in the cases where the original input image is square in shape and the case when it isn't square?
In SSD architecture there are scales for anchors which are fixed ahead, e.g. linear values across the range 0.2-0.9. These values are relative to the image size. For example, given 320x320 image, then smallest anchor (with 1:1 ratio) will be 64x64, and largest anchor will be 288x288. However, if you wish to insert to your model a larger image, e.g. 640x640, but without changing the anchor sizes (for example since these are images of far objects, so there's no need for large objects; not leaving the anchor sizes untouched allows you not to fine-tune the model on the new resolution), then you can simply have a base_anchor_size=0.5, meaning the anchor scales would be 0.5*[0.2-0.9] relative to the input image size.
The default value for this parameter is [1.0, 1.0], meaning not having any affect.
The entries correspond to [height, width] relative to the maximal square you can fit in the image, meaning [min(image_height,image_width),min(image_height,image_width)]. So, if for example, your input image is VGA, i.e. 640x480, then the base_anchor_size is taken to be relative to [480,480].

Tuning first_stage_anchor_generator in faster rcnn model

I am trying to detect some very small object (~25x25 pixels) from large image (~ 2040, 1536 pixels) using faster rcnn model from object_detect_api from here https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection
I am very confused about the following configuration parameters(I have read the proto file and also tried modify them and test):
first_stage_anchor_generator {
grid_anchor_generator {
scales: [0.25, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0]
aspect_ratios: [0.5, 1.0, 2.0]
height_stride: 16
width_stride: 16
}
}
I am kind of very new to this area, if some one can explain a bit about these parameters to me it would be very appreciated.
My Question is how should I adjust above (or other) parameters to accommodate for the fact that I have very small fix-sized objects to detect in large image.
Thanks
I don't know the actual answer, but I suspect that the way Faster RCNN works in Tensorflow object detection is as follows:
this article says:
"Anchors play an important role in Faster R-CNN. An anchor is a box. In the default configuration of Faster R-CNN, there are 9 anchors at a position of an image. The following graph shows 9 anchors at the position (320, 320) of an image with size (600, 800)."
and the author gives an image showing an overlap of boxes, those are the proposed regions that contain the object based on the "CNN" part of the "RCNN" model, next comes the "R" part of the "RCNN" model which is the region proposal. To do that, there is another neural network that is trained alongside the CNN to figure out the best fit box. There are a lot of "proposals" where an object could be based on all the boxes, but we still don't know where it is.
This "region proposal" neural net's job is to find the correct region and it is trained based on the labels you provide with the coordinates of each object in the image.
Looking at this file, I noticed:
line 174: heights = scales / ratio_sqrts * base_anchor_size[0]
line 175: widths = scales * ratio_sqrts * base_anchor_size[[1]]
which seems to be the final goal of the configurations found in the config file(to generate a list of sliding windows with known widths and heights). While the base_anchor_size is created as a default of [256, 256]. In the comments the author of the code wrote:
"For example, setting scales=[.1, .2, .2]
and aspect ratios = [2,2,1/2] means that we create three boxes: one with scale
.1, aspect ratio 2, one with scale .2, aspect ratio 2, and one with scale .2
and aspect ratio 1/2. Each box is multiplied by "base_anchor_size" before
placing it over its respective center."
which gives insight into how these boxes are created, the code seems to be creating a list of boxes based on the scales =[stuff] and aspect_ratios = [stuff] parameters that will be used to slide over the image. The scale is fairly straightforward and is how much the default square box of 256 by 256 should be scaled before it is used and the aspect ratio is the thing that changes the original square box into a rectangle that is more closer to the (scaled) shape of the objects you expect to encounter.
Meaning, to optimally configure the scales and aspect ratios, you should find the "typical" sizes of the object in the image whatever it is ex(20 by 30, 5 by 10 ,etc) and figure out how much the default of 256 by 256 square box should be scaled to optimally fit that, then find the "typical" aspect ratios of your objects(according to google an aspect ratio is: the ratio of the width to the height of an image or screen.) and set those as your aspect ratio parameters.
Note: it seems that the number of elements in the scales and aspect_ratios lists in the config file should be the same but I don't know for sure.
Also I am not sure about how to find the optimal stride, but if your objects are smaller than 16 by 16 pixels the sliding window you created by setting the scales and aspect ratios to what you want might just skip your object altogether.
As I believe proposal anchors are generated only for model types of Faster RCNN. In this file you have specified what parameters may be set for anchors generation within line you mentioned from config.
I tried setting base_anchor_size, however I failed. Though this FasterRCNNTutorial tutorial mentions that:
[...] you also need to configure the anchor sizes and aspect ratios in the .config file. The base anchor size is 255,255.
The anchor ratios will multiply the x dimension and divide the y dimension, so if you have an aspect ratio of 0.5 your 255x255 anchor becomes 128x510. Each aspect ratio in the list is applied, then the results are multiplied by the scales. So the first step is to resize your images to the training/testing size, then manually check what the smallest and largest objects you expect are, and what the most extreme aspect ratios will be. Set up the config file with values that will cover these cases when the base anchor size is adjusted by the aspect ratios and multiplied by the scales.
I think it's pretty straightforward. I also used this 'workaround'.

Darknet YOLO image size

I am trying to train custom object classifier in Darknet YOLO v2
https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/
I gathered a dataset for images most of them are 6000 x 4000 px and some lower resolutions as well.
Do I need to resize the images before training to be squared ?
I found that the config uses:
[net]
batch=64
subdivisions=8
height=416
width=416
channels=3
momentum=0.9
decay=0.0005
angle=0
saturation = 1.5
exposure = 1.5
hue=.1
thats why I was wondering how to use it for different sizes of data sets.
You don't have to resize it, because Darknet will do it instead of you!
It means you really don't need to do that and you can use different image sizes during your training. What you posted above is just network configuration. There should be full network definition as well. And the height and the width tell you what's the network resolution. And it also keeps aspect ratio, check e.g this.
You don't need to resize your database images. PJReddie's YOLO architecture does it by itself keeping the aspect ratio safe (no information will miss) according to the resolution in .cfg file.
For Example, if you have image size 1248 x 936, YOLO will resize it to 416 x 312 and then pad the extra space with black bars to fit into 416 x 416 network.
It is very common to resize images before training. 416x416 is slightly larger than common. Most imagenet models resize and square the images to 256x256 for example. So I would expect the same here. Trying to train on 6000x4000 is going to require a farm of GPUs. The standard process is to square the image to the largest dimension (height, or width), padding with 0's on the shorter side, then resizing using standard image resizing tools like PIL.
You do not need to resize the images, you can directly change the values in darknet.cfg file.
When you open darknet.cfg (yolo-darknet.cfg) file, you can all
hyper-parameters and their values.
As showed in your cfg file images dimensions are (416,416)->(weight,height), you can change the values, so that darknet will automatically resize the images before training.
Since the images have high dimensions, you can adjust batch and sub-division values (lower the values 32,16,8 . it has to be multiples of 2), so that darknet will not crash (memory allocation error)
By default the darknet api changes the size of the images in both inference and training, but in theory any input size w, h = 32 x X where X belongs to a natural number should, W is the width, H the height. By default X = 13, so the input size is w, h = (416, 416). I use this rule with yolov3 in opencv, and it works better the bigger X is.

ImageMagick losing aspect ratio

Very simply I have a script that calls imagemagick on my photos.
The original image is 320 x 444, and I want to create a few scaled down versions but keeping the same aspect ratio
I call imagemagick using
convert oldfile.png -resize 290x newfile.png
I want to scale it to my set widths but the heights scale accordingly.
I do 80x, 160x and 290x in 3 separate commands.
The smallest 2 produce images with the same original aspect ratio, the 290x does not.
The size of the image it produces is 290 x 402
I have no idea why that one fails to keep the aspect ratio but the other 2 sizes maintaine it.
Any ideas?
I think that the problem in the third command is the requested size itself:
in the first command both dimensions are divided by 4: 320/4=80 and 444/4=111
in the second command both dimensions are divided by 2: 320/2=160 and 444/2=222
444 and 320 have only two common divisors: 2 and 4. You already used these divisors in your first two commands, so any other (width, height) couple will give you a slightly different aspect ratio: it is impossible to obtain the same exact aspect ratio fixing 290.
In fact while your original image has an aspect ratio of 1.3875, with a 290x403 image you would obtain an aspect ratio of 1,389655172 and with a 290x402 image you would get a 1,386206897 ratio: fixing 290 there is no other dimension's value that can give you the desired aspect ratio.
In general however Imagemagick always tries to preserve the aspect ratio of the image, as you can read in Imagemagick documentation:
The argument to the resize operator is the area into which the image
should be fitted. This area is not the final size of the image but the
maximum sizes for the image. that is because IM tries to preserve the
aspect ratio of the image more than the final (unless a '!' flag is
given), but at least one (if not both) of the final dimensions should
match the argument given image. So let me be clear... Resize will fit
the image into the requested size. It does NOT fill, the requested box
size.
For further reference see here

face alignment algorithm on images

How can I do a basic face alignment on a 2-dimensional image with the assumption that I have the position/coordinates of the mouth and eyes.
Is there any algorithm that I could implement to correct the face alignment on images?
Face (or image) alignment refers to aligning one image (or face in your case) with respect to another (or a reference image/face). It is also referred to as image registration. You can do that using either appearance (intensity-based registration) or key-point locations (feature-based registration). The second category stems from image motion models where one image is considered a displaced version of the other.
In your case the landmark locations (3 points for eyes and nose?) provide a good reference set for straightforward feature-based registration. Assuming you have the location of a set of points in both of the 2D images, x_1 and x_2 you can estimate a similarity transform (rotation, translation, scaling), i.e. a planar 2D transform S that maps x_1 to x_2. You can additionally add reflection to that, though for faces this will most-likely be unnecessary.
Estimation can be done by forming the normal equations and solving a linear least-squares (LS) problem for the x_1 = Sx_2 system using linear regression. For the 5 unknown parameters (2 rotation, 2 translation, 1 scaling) you will need 3 points (2.5 to be precise) for solving 5 equations. Solution to the above LS can be obtained through Direct Linear Transform (e.g. by applying SVD or a matrix pseudo-inverse). For cases of a sufficiently large number of reference points (i.e. automatically detected) a RANSAC-type method for point filtering and uncertainty removal (though this is not your case here).
After estimating S, apply image warping on the second image to get the transformed grid (pixel) coordinates of the entire image 2. The transform will change pixel locations but not their appearance. Unavoidably some of the transformed regions of image 2 will lie outside the grid of image 1, and you can decide on the values for those null locations (e.g. 0, NaN etc.).
For more details: R. Szeliski, "Image Alignment and Stitching: A Tutorial" (Section 4.3 "Geometric Registration")
In OpenCV see: Geometric Image Transformations, e.g. cv::getRotationMatrix2D cv::getAffineTransform and cv::warpAffine. Note though that you should estimate and apply a similarity transform (special case of an affine) in order to preserve angles and shapes.
For the face there is lot of variability in feature points. So it won't be possible to do a perfect fit of all feature points by just affine transforms. The only way to align all the points perfectly is to warp the image given the points. Basically you can do a triangulation of image given the points and do a affine warp of each triangle to get the warped image where all the points are aligned.
Face detection could be handled based on the just eye positions.
Herein, OpenCV, Dlib and MTCNN offers to detect faces and eyes. Besides, it is a python based framework but deepface wraps those methods and offers an out-of-the box detection and alignment function.
detectFace function applies detection and alignment in the background respectively.
#!pip install deepface
from deepface import DeepFace
backends = ['opencv', 'ssd', 'dlib', 'mtcnn']
DeepFace.detectFace("img.jpg", detector_backend = backends[0])
Besides, you can apply detection and alignment manually.
from deepface.commons import functions
img = functions.load_image("img.jpg")
backends = ['opencv', 'ssd', 'dlib', 'mtcnn']
detected_face = functions.detect_face(img = img, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(detected_face)
aligned_face = functions.align_face(img = img, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(aligned_face)
processed_img = functions.detect_face(img = aligned_face, detector_backend = backends[3])
plt.imshow(processed_img)
There's a section Aligning Face Images in OpenCV's Face Recognition guide:
http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/modules/contrib/doc/facerec/facerec_tutorial.html#aligning-face-images
The script aligns given images at the eyes. It's written in Python, but should be easy to translate to other languages. I know of a C# implementation by Sorin Miron:
http://code.google.com/p/stereo-face-recognition/