I have a dataset composed of 10k-15k pictures for supervised object detection which is very different from Imagenet or Coco (pictures are much darker and represent completely different things, industrial related).
The model currently used is a FasterRCNN which extracts features with a Resnet used as a backbone.
Could train the backbone of the model from scratch in one stage and then train the whole network in another stage be beneficial for the task, instead of loading the network pretrained on Coco and then retraining all the layers of the whole network in a single stage?
From my experience, here are some important points:
your train set is not big enough to train the detector from scratch (though depends on network configuration, fasterrcnn+resnet18 can work). Better to use a pre-trained network on the imagenet;
the domain the network was pre-trained on is not really that important. The network, especially the big one, need to learn all those arches, circles, and other primitive figures in order to use the knowledge for detecting more complex objects;
the brightness of your train images can be important but is not something to stop you from using a pre-trained network;
training from scratch requires much more epochs and much more data. The longer the training is the more complex should be your LR control algorithm. At a minimum, it should not be constant and change the LR based on the cumulative loss. and the initial settings depend on multiple factors, such as network size, augmentations, and the number of epochs;
I played a lot with fasterrcnn+resnet (various number of layers) and the other networks. I recommend you to use maskcnn instead of fasterrcnn. Just command it not to use the masks and not to do the segmentation. I don't know why but it gives much better results.
don't spend your time on mobilenet, with your train set size you will not be able to train it with some reasonable AP and AR. Start with maskrcnn+resnet18 backbone.
Related
pretty new to deep learning, but couldn't seem to find/figure out what are backend weights such as
full_yolo_backend.h5
squeezenet_backend.h5
From what I have found and experimented, these backend weights have fundamentally different model architectures such as
yolov2 model has 40+ layers but the backend only 20+ layers (?)
you can build on top of the backend model with your own networks (?)
using backend models tend to yield poorer results (?)
I was hoping to seek some explanation on backend weights vs actual models for learning purposes. Thank you so much!
I'm note sure which implementation you are using but in many applications, you can consider a deep model as a feature extractor whose output is more or less task-agnostic, followed by a number of task-specific heads.
The choice of backend depends on your specific constraints in terms of tradeoff between accuracy and computational complexity. Examples of classical but time-consuming choices for backends are resnet-101, resnet-50 or VGG that can be coupled with FPN (feature pyramid networks) to yield multiscale features. However, if speed is your main concern then you can use smaller backends such as different MobileNet architectures or even the vanilla networks such as the ones used in the original Yolov1/v2 papers (tinyYolo is an extreme case).
Once you have chosen your backend (you can use a pretrained one), you can load its weights (that is what your *h5 files are). On top of that, you will add a small head that will carry the tasks that you need: this can be classification, bbox regression, or like in MaskRCNN forground/background segmentation. For Yolov2, you can just add very few, for example 3 convolutional layers (with non-linearities of course) that will output a tensor of size
BxC1xC2xAxP
#B==batch size
#C1==number vertical of cells
#C2==number of horizontal cells
#C3==number of anchors
#C4==number of parameters (i.e. bbx parameters, class prediction, confidence)
Then, you can just save/load the weights of this head separately. When you are happy with your results though, training jointly (end-to-end) will usually give you a small boost in accuracy.
Finally, to come back to your last questions, I assume that you are getting poor results with the backends because you are only loading backend weights but not the weights of the heads. Another possibility is that you are using a head trained with a backends X but that you are switching the backend to Y. In that case since the head expects different features, it's natural to see a drop in performance.
I am a beginner, and I am very confused about how we can choose a pre-trained model that will improve my model.
I am trying to create a cat breed classifier using pre-trained weights of a model, lets say VGG16 trained on digits dataset, will that improve the performance of the model? or if I train my model just on the database without using any other weights will be better, or will both be the same as those pre-trained weights will be just a starting point.
Also if I use weights of the VGG16 trained for cat vs dog data as a starting point of my cat breed classification model will that help me in improving the model?
Since you've mentioned that you are a beginner I'll try to be a bit more verbose than normal so please bear with me.
How neural models recognise images
The layers in a pre-trained model store multiple aspects of the images they were trained on like patterns(lines, curves), colours within the image which it uses to decide if an image is of a specific class or not
With each layer the complexity of what it can store increases initially it captures lines or dots or simple curves but with each layer, the representation power increases and it starts capturing features like cat ears, dog face, curves in a number etc.
The image below from Keras blog shows how initial layers learn to represent simple things like dots and lines and as we go deeper they start to learn to represent more complex patterns.
Read more about Conv net Filters at keras's blog here
How does using a pretrained model give better results ?
When we train a model we waste a lot of compute and time initially creating these representations and in order to get to those representations we need quite a lot of data too else we might not be able to capture all relevant features and our model might not be as accurate.
So when we say we want to use a pre-trained model we want to use these representations so if we use a model trained on imagenet which has lots of cat pics we can be sure that the model already has representations to identify important features required to identify a cat and will converge to a better point than if we used random weights.
How to use pre-trained weights
So when we say to use pre-trained weights we mean use the layers which hold the representations to identify cats but discard the last layer (dense and output) and instead add fresh dense and output layers with random weights. So our predictions can make use of the representations already learned.
In real life we freeze our pretrained weights during the initial training as we do not want our random weights at the bottom to ruin the learned representations. we only unfreeze the representations in the end after we have a good classification accuracy to fine-tune them, and that too with a very small learning rate.
Which kind of pre-trained model to use
Always choose those pretrained weights that you know has the most amount of representations which can help you in identifying the class you are interested in.
So will using a mnist digits trained weights give relatively bad results when compared with one trained on image net?
Yes, but given that the initial layers have already learned simple patterns like lines and curves for digits using these weights will still put you at an advantage when compared to starting from scratch in most of the cases.
Sane weight initialization
The pre-trained weights to choose depends upon the type of classes you wish to classify. Since, you wish to classify Cat Breeds, use pre-trained weights from a classifier that is trained on similar task. As mentioned by the above answers the initial layers learn things like edges, horizontal or vertical lines, blobs, etc. As you go deeper, the model starts learning problem specific features. So for generic tasks you can use say imagenet & then fine-tune it for the problem at hand.
However, having a pre-trained model which closely resembles your training data helps immensely. A while ago, I had participated in Scene Classification Challenge where we initialized our model with the ResNet50 weights trained on Places365 dataset. Since, the classes in the above challenge were all present in the Places365 dataset, we used the weights available here and fine-tuned our model. This gave us a great boost in our accuracy & we ended up at top positions on the leaderboard.
You can find some more details about it in this blog
Also, understand that the one of the advantages of transfer learning is saving computations. Using a model with randomly initialized weights is like training a neural net from scratch. If you use VGG16 weights trained on digits dataset, then it might have already learned something, so it will definitely save some training time. If you train a model from scratch then it will eventually learn all the patterns which using a pre-trained digits classifier weights would have learnt.
On the other hand using weights from a Dog-vs-Cat classifier should give you better performance as it already has learned features to detect say paws, ears, nose or whiskers.
Could you provide more information, what do you want to classify exactly? I see you wish to classify images, which type of images (containing what?) and in which classes?
As a general remark : If you use a trained model, it must fit your need, of course. Keep in mind that a model which was trained on a given dataset, learned only the information contained in that dataset and can classify / indentify information analogous to the one in the training dataset.
If you want to classify an image containing an animal with a Y/N (binary) classifier, (cat or not cat) you should use a model trained on different animals, cats among them.
If you want to classify an image of a cat into classes corresponding to cat races, let's say, you should use a model trained only on cats images.
I should say you should use a pipeline, containing steps 1. followed by 2.
it really depends on the size of the dataset you have at hand and how related the task and data that the model was pretrained on to your task and data. Read more about Transfer Learning http://cs231n.github.io/transfer-learning/ or Domain Adaptation if your task is the same.
I am trying to create a cat breed classifier using pre-trained weights of a model, lets say VGG16 trained on digits dataset, will that improve the performance of the model?
There are general characteristics that are still learned from digits like edge detection that could be useful for your target task, so the answer here is maybe. You can here try just training the top layers which is common in computer vision applications.
Also if I use weights of the VGG16 trained for cat vs dog data as a starting point of my cat breed classification model will that help me in improving the model?
Your chances should be better if the task and data are more related and similar
I have a pretrained CNN (Resnet-18) trained on Imagenet, now i want to extend it on my own dataset of video frames , now the point is all tutorials i found on Finetuning required dataset to be organised in classes like
class1/train/
class1/test/
class2/train/
class2/test/
but i have only frames on many videos , how will i train my CNN on it.
So can anyone point me in right direction , any tutorial or paper etc ?
PS: My final task is to get deep features of all frames that i provide at the time of testing
for training network, you should have some 'label'(sometimes called y) of your input data. from there, network calculate loss between logit(answer of network) and the given label.
And the network will self-revise using that loss value by backpropagating. that process is what we call 'training'.
Because you only have input data, not label, so you can get the logit only. that means a loss cannot be calculated.
Fine tuning is almost same word with 'additional training', so that you cannot fine tuning your pre-trained network without labeled data.
About train set & test set, that is not the problem right now.
If you have enough labeled input data, you can divide it with some ratio.
(e.g. 80% of data for training, 20% of data for testing)
the reason why divide data into these two sets, we want to check the performance of our trained network more general, unseen situation.
However, if you just input your data into pre-trained network(encoder part), it will give a deep feature. It doesn't exactly fit to your task, still it is deep feature.
Added)
Unsupervised pre-training for convolutional neural network in theano
here is the method you need, deep feature encoder in unsupervised situation. I hope it will help.
I have a small dataset collect from imagenet(7 classes each class with 1000 training data). I try to train it with alexnet model. But somehow the accuracy just cant go any higher(about 68% maximum). I remove conv4 and conv5 layer to prevent model overfitting also decrease the number of neuron in each layer(conv and fc). here is my setup.
Did i do anything wrong so that the accuracy is so low?
I want to sort out a few terms:
(1) A perceptron is an individual cell in a neural net.
(2) In a CNN, we generally focus on the kernel (filter) as a unit; this is the square matrix of perceptrons that forms a psuedo-visual unit.
(3) The only place it usually makes sense to focus on an individual perceptron is in the FC layers. When you talk about removing some of the perceptrons, I think you mean kernels.
The most important part of training a model is to make sure that your model is properly fitted to the problem at hand. AlexNet (and CaffeNet, the BVLC implementation) is fitted to the full ImageNet data set. Alex Krizhevsky and his colleagues spent a lot of research effort in tuning their network to the problem. You are not going to get similar accuracy -- on a severely reduced data set -- by simply removing layers and kernels at random.
I suggested that you start from CONVNET (the CIFAR-10 net) because it's much better tuned to this scale of problem. Most of all, I strongly recommend that you make constant use of your visualization tools, so that you can detect when the various kernel layers begin to learn their patterns, and to see the effects of small changes in the topology.
You need to run some experiments to tune and understand your topology. Record the kernel visualizations at chosen times during the training -- perhaps at intervals of 10% of expected convergence -- and compare the visual acuity as you remove a few kernels, or delete an entire layer, or whatever else you choose.
For instance, I expect that if you do this with your current amputated CaffeNet, you'll find that the severe losses in depth and breadth greatly change the feature recognition it's learning. The current depth of building blocks is not enough to recognize edges, then shapes, then full body parts. However, I could be wrong -- you do have three remaining layers. That's why I asked you to post the visualizations you got, to compare with published AlexNet features.
edit: CIFAR VISUALIZATION
CIFAR is much better differentiated between classes than is ILSVRC-2012. Thus, the training requires less detail per layer and fewer layers. Training is faster, and the filters are not nearly as interesting to the human eye. This is not a problem with the Gabor (not Garbor) filter; it's just that the model doesn't have to learn so many details.
For instance, for CONVNET to discriminate between a jonquil and a jet, we just need a smudge of yellow inside a smudge of white (the flower). For AlexNet to tell a jonquil from a cymbidium orchid, the network needs to learn about petal count or shape.
I am trying to train a learning model to recognize one specific scene. For example, say I would like to train it to recognize pictures taken at an amusement park and I already have 10 thousand pictures taken at an amusement park. I would like to train this model with those pictures so that it would be able to give a score for other pictures of the probability that they were taken at an amusement park. How do I do that?
Considering this is an image recognition problem, I would probably use a convolutional neural network, but I am not quite sure how to train it in this case.
Thanks!
There are several possible ways. The most trivial one is to collect a large number of negative examples (images from other places) and train a two-class model.
The second approach would be to train a network to extract meaningful low-dimensional representations from an input image (embeddings). Here you can use siamese training to explicitly train the network to learn similarities between images. Such an approach is employed for face recognition, for instance (see FaceNet). Having such embeddings, you can use some well-established methods for outlier detections, for instance, 1-class SVM, or any other classifier. In this case you also need negative examples.
I would heavily augment your data using image cropping - it is the most obvious way to increase the amount of training data in your case.
In general, your success in this task strongly depends on the task statement (are restricted to parks only, or any kind of place) and the proper data.