ImageDeserializer mean file with variable sized images? - cntk

When you have variable sized input images and use the ImageDeserializer to resize the images, how are you supposed to deal with a mean file? Computing the mean file is easy when the input images are all the same size. Wouldn't it be better if the ImageDeserializer would be capable of compute the means?

The order in which image pre-processing steps are executed by default are:
Take a crop that has the desired image size
Subtract the mean
Hence, your mean file hence only has to contain a mean for the desired input size.
For computing the mean yourself, you will have to repeat these steps, at least to some degree. If you're on .NET, then you may want to have a look at this post where .NET image pre-processing is discussed.
I agree that it would be helpful if there was some tool to compute the mean file. I can understand though why the image deserializer does not do it automatically: You need to transform your training and test data via the same mean file. If you subtract mean from training data automatically, you'll have no way of repeating the same operation on the test data. Plus there is randomization that could make it messy in some cases, etc.

Related

How to find keyword in audio file and deliver timestamps

I wonder how to find a certain keyword (potentially multiple times) in a (long, lets say 1-2 hours) audio file with their corresponding time stamps of start and end of it.
Let's say we do it with Tensorflow as described here. The problems I see are the following: In reality the keyword we use to train can be a bit longer or shorter (for example you can say "no" or "nooooo", ranging therefore from 0.1s to 3s maybe). In the link they use padding for that so the input for training and inference is always in the same shape.
So what is in reality the best way to deal with:
Different input lengths of the audio snippets to train? Padding and cutting might destroy important information or add nonsensical "emptiness".
How to find/run inference in the long audio file? Moving window with a resolution of 16kHz would be the obvious way but that can't be an efficient way.
How to then get the timestamps?
Thanks!

Reverse Image search (for image duplicates) on local computer

I have a bunch of poor quality photos that I extracted from a pdf. Somebody I know has the good quality photo's somewhere on her computer(Mac), but it's my understanding that it will be difficult to find them.
I would like to
loop through each poor quality photo
perform a reverse image search using each poor quality photo as the query image and using this persons computer as the database to search for the higher quality images
and create a copy of each high quality image in one destination folder.
Example pseudocode
for each image in poorQualityImages:
search ./macComputer for a higherQualityImage of image
copy higherQualityImage to ./higherQualityImages
I need to perform this action once.
I am looking for a tool, github repo or library which can perform this functionality more so than a deep understanding of content based image retrieval.
There's a post on reddit where someone was trying to do something similar
imgdupes is a program which seems like it almost achieves this, but I do not want to delete the duplicates, I want to copy the highest quality duplicate to a destination folder
Update
Emailed my previous image processing prof and he sent me this
Off the top of my head, nothing out of the box.
No guaranteed solution here, but you can narrow the search space.
You’d need a little program that outputs the MSE or SSIM similarity
index between two images, and then write another program or shell
script that scans the hard drive and computes the MSE between each
image on the hard drive and each query image, then check the images
with the top X percent similarity score.
Something like that. Still not maybe guaranteed to find everything
you want. And if the low quality images are of different pixel
dimensions than the high quality images, you’d have to do some image
scaling to get the similarity index. If the poor quality images have
different aspect ratios, that’s even worse.
So I think it’s not hard but not trivial either. The degree of
difficulty is partly dependent on the nature of the corruption in the
low quality images.
UPDATE
Github project I wrote which achieves what I want
What you are looking for is called image hashing
. In this answer you will find a basic explanation of the concept, as well as a go-to github repo for plug-and-play application.
Basic concept of Hashing
From the repo page: "We have developed a new image hash based on the Marr wavelet that computes a perceptual hash based on edge information with particular emphasis on corners. It has been shown that the human visual system makes special use of certain retinal cells to distinguish corner-like stimuli. It is the belief that this corner information can be used to distinguish digital images that motivates this approach. Basically, the edge information attained from the wavelet is compressed into a fixed length hash of 72 bytes. Binary quantization allows for relatively fast hamming distance computation between hashes. The following scatter plot shows the results on our standard corpus of images. The first plot shows the distances between each image and its attacked counterpart (e.g. the intra distances). The second plot shows the inter distances between altogether different images. While the hash is not designed to handle rotated images, notice how slight rotations still generally fall within a threshold range and thus can usually be matched as identical. However, the real advantage of this hash is for use with our mvp tree indexing structure. Since it is more descriptive than the dct hash (being 72 bytes in length vs. 8 bytes for the dct hash), there are much fewer false matches retrieved for image queries.
"
Another blogpost for an in-depth read, with an application example.
Available Code and Usage
A github repo can be found here. There are obviously more to be found.
After importing the package you can use it to generate and compare hashes:
>>> from PIL import Image
>>> import imagehash
>>> hash = imagehash.average_hash(Image.open('test.png'))
>>> print(hash)
d879f8f89b1bbf
>>> otherhash = imagehash.average_hash(Image.open('other.bmp'))
>>> print(otherhash)
ffff3720200ffff
>>> print(hash == otherhash)
False
>>> print(hash - otherhash)
36
The demo script find_similar_images also on the mentioned github, illustrates how to find similar images in a directory.
Premise
I'll focus my answer on the image processing part, as I believe implementation details e.g. traversing a file system is not the core of your problem. Also, all that follows is just my humble opinion, I am sure that there are better ways to retrieve your image of which I am not aware. Anyway, I agree with what your prof said and I'll follow the same line of thought, so I'll share some ideas on possible similarity indexes you might use.
Answer
MSE and SSIM - This is a possible solution, as suggested by your prof. As I assume the low quality images also have a different resolution than the good ones, remember to downsample the good ones (and not upsample the bad ones).
Image subtraction (1-norm distance) - Subtract two images -> if they are equal you'll get a black image. If they are slightly different, the non-black pixels (or the sum of the pixel intensity) can be used as a similarity index. This is actually the 1-norm distance.
Histogram distance - You can refer to this paper: https://www.cse.huji.ac.il/~werman/Papers/ECCV2010.pdf. Comparing two images' histograms might be potentially robust for your task. Check out this question too: Comparing two histograms
Embedding learning - As I see you included tensorflow, keras or pytorch as tags, let's consider deep learning. This paper came to my
mind: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.03832.pdf The idea is to learn a
mapping from the image space to a Euclidian space - i.e. compute an
embedding of the image. In the embedding hyperspace, images are
points. This paper learns an embedding function by minimizing the
triplet loss. The triplet loss is meant to maximize the distance
between images of different classes and minimize the distance between
images of the same class. You could train the same model on a Dataset
like ImageNet. You could augment the dataset with by lowering the
quality of the images, in order to make the model "invariant" to
difference in image quality (e.g. down-sampling followed by
up-sampling, image compression, adding noise, etc.). Once you can
compute embedding, you could compute the Euclidian distance (as a
substitute of the MSE). This might work better than using MSE/SSIM as a similarity indexes. Repo of FaceNet: https://github.com/timesler/facenet-pytorch. Another general purpose approach (not related to faces) which might help you: https://github.com/zegami/image-similarity-clustering.
Siamese networks for predicting similarity score - I am referring to this paper on face verification: http://bmvc2018.org/contents/papers/0410.pdf. The siamese network takes two images as input and outputs a value in the [0, 1]. We can interpret the output as the probability that the two images belong to the same class. You can train a model of this kind to predict 1 for image pairs of the following kind: (good quality image, artificially degraded image). To degrade the image, again, you can combine e.g. down-sampling followed by
up-sampling, image compression, adding noise, etc. Let the model predict 0 for image pairs of different classes (e.g. different images). The output of the network can e used as a similarity index.
Remark 1
These different approaches can also be combined. They all provide you with similarity indexes, so you can very easily average the outcomes.
Remark 2
If you only need to do it once, the effort you need to put in implementing and training deep models might be not justified. I would not suggest it. Still, you can consider it if you can't find any other solution and that Mac is REALLY FULL of images and a manual search is not possible.
If you look at the documentation of imgdupes you will see there is the following option:
--dry-run
dry run (do not delete any files)
So if you run imgdupes with --dry-run you will get a listing of all the duplicate images but it will not actually delete anything. You should be able to process that output to move the images around as you need.
Try similar image finder I have developed to address this problem.
There is an explanation and the algorithm there, so you can implement your own version if needed.

Should the size of the photos be the same for deep learning?

I have lots of image (about 40 GB).
My images are small but they don't have same size.
My images aren't from natural things because I made them from a signal so all pixels are important and I can't crop or delete any pixel.
Is it possible to use deep learning for this kind of images with different shapes?
All pixels are important, please take this into consideration.
I want a model which does not depend on a fixed size input image. Is it possible?
Without knowing what you're trying to learn from the data, it's tough to give a definitive answer:
You could pad all the data at the beginning (or end) of the signal so
they're all the same size. This allows you to keep all the important
pixels, but adds irrelevant information to the image that the network
will most likely ignore.
I've also had good luck with activations where you take a pretrained
network and pull features from the image at a certain part of the
network regardless of size (as long as it's larger than the network
input size). Then run through a classifier.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/deeplearning/ref/activations.html#d117e95083
Or you could window your data, and only process smaller chunks at one
time.
https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/examples/cocktail-party-source-separation-using-deep-learning-networks.html

Tiled Instance Normalization

I am currently implementing a few image style transfer algorithms for Tensorflow, but I would like to do it in tiles, so I don't have to run the entire image through the network. Everything works fine, however each image is normalized differently, according to its own statistics, which results in tiles with slightly different characteristics.
I am certain that the only issue is instance normalization, since if I feed the true values (obtained from the entire image) to each tile calculation the result is perfect, however I still have to run the entire image through the network to calculate these values. I also tried calculating these values using a downsampled version of the image, but resolution suffers a lot.
So my question is: is it possible to estimate mean and variance values for instance normalization without feeding the entire image through the network?
You can take a random sample of the pixels of the image, and use the sample mean and sample variance to normalize the whole image. It will not be perfect, but the larger the sample, the better. A few hundred pixels will probably suffice, maybe even less, but you need to experiment.
Use tf.random_uniform() to get random X and Y coordinates, and then use tf.gather_nd() to get the pixel values at the given coordinates.

How to determine when PNG24 converted to PNG8 is lossless?

Hey, i'm using a program called pngquant to convert 24 bit PNGs to 8-bit PNGs. Everything seems to work fine, and I don't notice any loss of quality for icons and other images that don't contain too much colors. Now when I feed it a PNG photo with zillions of colours, it produces a PNG8 where I can see some quality loss.
I'd like to determine that quality loss programmatically. I'd like to know when converting a PNG24 to PNG8 is safe or not. Sort of what webpagetest.org does -- they tell you that this specific image will be smaller in size if converted to PNG8 and will not loose quality.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
This sounds like a full-reference image quality assessment problem.
The simplest way to approach this is to try computing the PSNR between the PNG24 and PNG8 images. This is a measure of the difference between the two images. The higher the PSNR, the less different the images are. After using your color quantization software, check if the PSNR is above some threshold (you'll have to determine that empirically), and if it is, then the quantization was "safe".
PSNR has its down sides, namely the fact that it doesn't always correspond to the way the human visual system works (for example, it neglects the phenomenon of spatial and contrast masking). Another metric, SSIM, attempts to take care of that problem, but is slightly more difficult to compute (here is an OpenCV implementation, though). You can use SSIM instead of PSNR in the thresholding approach I described above.
Here's another thread which you might find useful.
Quite simple. If the image you are converting from PNG24 to PNG8 has more thant 256 colors, you gonna loose quality. Do I missed something?
For development of pngquant I use my own SSIM tool, since the OpenCV-based one didn't seem to support gamma correction nor alpha channel properly.
When you run pngquant -v it will output amount of error introduced as MSE=n (n is mean square error — 0 is perfect quality).
The latest version has --quality setting which lets you set minimum required quality. If it can't achieve it, it won't save the file.