Upsampling in Semantic Segmentation - neural-network

I am trying to implement a paper on Semantic Segmentation and I am confused about how to Upsample the prediction map produced by my segmentation network to match the input image size.
For example, I am using a variant of Resnet101 as the segmentation network (as used by the paper). With this network structure, an input of size 321x321 (again used in the paper) produces a final prediction map of size 41x41xC (C is the number of classes). Because I have to make pixel-level predictions, I need to upsample it to 321x321xC. Pytorch provides function to Upsample to an output size which is a multiple of the prediction map size. So, I can not directly use that method here.
Because this step is involved in every semantic segmentation network, I am sure there should be a standard way to implement this.
I would appreciate any pointers. Thanks in advance.

Maybe the simpliest thing you can try is:
upsample 8 times. Then you 41x41 input turns into 328x328
perform center cropping to get your desired shape 321x321 (for instance, something like this input[3:,3:,:-4,:-4])

Related

Intuition behind U-net vs FCN for semantic segmentation

I don't quite understand the following:
In the proposed FCN for Semantic Segmentation by Shelhamer et al, they propose a pixel-to-pixel prediction to construct masks/exact locations of objects in an image.
In the slightly modified version of the FCN for biomedical image segmentation, the U-net, the main difference seems to be "a concatenation with the correspondingly cropped feature map from the contracting path."
Now, why does this feature make a difference particularly for biomedical segmentation? The main differences I can point out for biomedical images vs other data sets is that in biomedical images there are not as rich set of features defining an object as for common every day objects. Also the size of the data set is limited. But is this extra feature inspired by these two facts or some other reason?
FCN vs U-Net:
FCN
It upsamples only once. i.e. it has only one layer in the decoder
The original implementation github repo uses bilinear interpolation for upsampling the convoloved image. That is there is no learnable filter here
variants of FCN-[FCN 16s and FCN 8s] add the skip connections from lower layers to make the output robust to scale changes
U-Net
multiple upsampling layers
uses skip connections and concatenates instead of adding up
uses learnable weight filters instead of fixed interpolation technique
U-Net is built upon J. Long's FCN paper. A couple of differences is that the original FCN paper used the decoder half to upsample the classification (i.e the entire second half of the net is of depth C - number of classes)
U-Net's think of the second half as being in feature space and do the final classification at the end.
Nothing about it is special to bio-medical IMO

How does a neural network work with correlated image data

I am new to TensorFlow and deep learning. I am trying to create a fully connected neural network for image processing. I am somewhat confused.
We have an image, say 28x28 pixels. This will have 784 inputs to the NN. For non-correlated inputs, this is fine, but image pixels are generally correlated. For instance, consider a picture of a cow's eye. How can a neural network understand this when we have all pixels lined up in an array for a fully-connected network. How does it determine the correlation?
Please research some tutorials on CNN (Convolutional Neural Network); here is a starting point for you. A fully connected layer of a NN surrenders all of the correlation information it might have had with the input. Structurally, it implements the principle that the inputs are statistically independent.
Alternately, a convolution layer depends upon the physical organization of the inputs (such as pixel adjacency), using that to find simple combinations (convolutions) of feature form one layer to another.
Bottom line: your NN doesn't find the correlation: the topology is wrong, and cannot do the job you want.
Also, please note that a layered network consisting of fully-connected neurons with linear weight combinations, is not deep learning. Deep learning has at least one hidden layer, a topology which fosters "understanding" of intermediate structures. A purely linear, fully-connected layering provides no such hidden layers. Even if you program hidden layers, the outputs remain a simple linear combination of the inputs.
Deep learning requires some other discrimination, such as convolutions, pooling, rectification, or other non-linear combinations.
Let's take it into peaces to understand the intuition behind NN learning to predict.
to predict a class of given image we have to find a correlation or direct link between once of it is input values to the class. we can think about finding one pixel can tell us this image belongs to this class. which is impossible so what we have to do is build up more complex function or let's call complex features. which will help us to find to generate a correlated data to the wanted class.
To make it simpler imagine you want to build AND function (p and q), OR function (p or q) in the both cases there is a direct link between the input and the output. in and function if there 0 in the input the output always zero. so what if we want to xor function (p xor q) there is no direct link between the input and the output. the answer is to build first layer of classifying AND and OR then by a second layer taking the result of the first layer we can build the function and classify the XOR function
(p xor q) = (p or q) and not (p and q)
By applying this method on Multi-layer NN you'll have the same result. but then you'll have to deal with huge amount of parameters. one solution to avoid this is to extract representative, variance and uncorrelated features between images and correlated with their class from the images and feed the to the Network. you can look for image features extraction on the web.
this is a small explanation for how to see the link between images and their classes and how NN work to classify them. you need to understand NN concept and then you can go to read about Deep-learning.

PCA on Sift desciptors and Fisher Vectors

I was reading this particular paper http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/publications/2011/Chatfield11/chatfield11.pdf and I find the Fisher Vector with GMM vocabulary approach very interesting and I would like to test it myself.
However, it is totally unclear (to me) how do they apply PCA dimensionality reduction on the data. I mean, do they calculate Feature Space and once it is calculated they perform PCA on it? Or do they just perform PCA on every image after SIFT is calculated and then they create feature space?
Is this supposed to be done for both training test sets? To me it's an 'obviously yes' answer, however it is not clear.
I was thinking of creating the feature space from training set and then run PCA on it. Then, I could use that PCA coefficient from training set to reduce each image's sift descriptor that is going to be encoded into Fisher Vector for later classification, whether it is a test or a train image.
EDIT 1;
Simplistic example:
[coef , reduced_feat_space]= pca(Feat_Space','NumComponents', 80);
and then (for both test and train images)
reduced_test_img = test_img * coef; (And then choose the first 80 dimensions of the reduced_test_img)
What do you think? Cheers
It looks to me like they do SIFT first and then do PCA. the article states in section 2.1 "The local descriptors are fixed in all experiments to be SIFT descriptors..."
also in the introduction section "the following three steps:(i) extraction
of local image features (e.g., SIFT descriptors), (ii) encoding of the local features in an image descriptor (e.g., a histogram of the quantized local features), and (iii) classification ... Recently several authors have focused on improving the second component" so it looks to me that the dimensionality reduction occurs after SIFT and the paper is simply talking about a few different methods of doing this, and the performance of each
I would also guess (as you did) that you would have to run it on both sets of images. Otherwise your would be using two different metrics to classify the images it really is like comparing apples to oranges. Comparing a reduced dimensional representation to the full one (even for the same exact image) will show some variation. In fact that is the whole premise of PCA, you are giving up some smaller features (usually) for computational efficiency. The real question with PCA or any dimensionality reduction algorithm is how much information can I give up and still reliably classify/segment different data sets
And as a last point, you would have to treat both images the same way, because your end goal is to use the Fisher Feature Vector for classification as either test or training. Now imagine you decided training images dont get PCA and test images do. Now I give you some image X, what would you do with it? How could you treat one set of images differently from another BEFORE you've classified them? Using the same technique on both sets means you'd process my image X then decide where to put it.
Anyway, I hope that helped and wasn't to rant-like. Good Luck :-)

Can neural network fail to learn a function? and How to choose better feature descriptors for pattern recognition?

I was working on webots which is an environment used to model, program and simulate mobile robots. Basically i have a small robot with a VGA camera, and it looks for simple blue coloured patterns on white walls of a small lego maze and moves accordingly
The method I used here was
​
Obtain images of the patterns from webots and save it in a location
in PC.
​​Detect the blue pattern, form a square enclosing the pattern
with atleast 2 edges of the pattern being part of the boundary of the
square.
​Resize it to 7x7 matrix(using nearest neighbour
interpolation algorithm)
The input to the network is nothing but the red pixel intensities of each of the 7x7 image(when i look at the blue pixel through a red filter it appears black so). The intensities of each pixel is extracted and the 7x7 matrix is then converted it to a 1D vector i.e 1x49 which is my input to the neural network. (I chose this characteristic as my input because it is 'relatively' less difficult to access this information using C and webots.​​)
I used MATLAB for this offline training method and I used a slower learning rate(0.06) to ensure parameter convergence and tested it on large and small datasets(1189 and 346 respectively). On all the numerous times I have tried, the network fails to classify the pattern.(it says the pattern belongs to all the 4 classes !!!! ) . There is nothing wrong with the program as I tested it out on the simpleclass_dataset in matlab and it works almost perfectly
Is it possible that the neural network fails to learn the function because of really poor data? (by poor data i mean that the datapoints corresponding to one sample of one class are very close to another sample belonging to a different class or something of that sort). Or can the neural network fail because of very poor feature descriptors?
Can anyone suggest a simpler method to extract features from the image(I am now shifting to MATLAB as I am now only concerned with simulations in webots and not the real robot). What sort of features can I choose? The patterns are very simple (L,an inverted L and its reflected versions are the 4 patterns)
Neural networks CAN fail to learn a function; this is most often caused by employing a network topology which is too simple to model the necessary function. A classic example of this case is attempting to learn an XOR function using a perceptron classifier, although it can even happen in multilayer neural nets sometimes; especially for complex tasks like image recognition. See my previous answer for a rough guide on how to select neural network parameters (ignore the convolution stuff if you want, although I would highly recommened looking into convolutional neural networks if you are still having problems).
It is a possiblity that there is too little seperability between classes, although I doubt that this is the case given your current features. Is there a reason that your network needs to allow an image to be four classifications simultaneously? If not, then perhaps you could classify the input as the output with the highest activation instead of all those with high activations.

Radial Basis Function

I am trying to make a simple radial basis function network (RBFN) for regression. I have a 20 dimensional (feature) dataset with over 600 samples. I need the final network to output 1 scalar value for each 20 dimensional sample.
Note: new to machine learning...and feel like I am missing an important concept here.
With the perceptron we can, and I have, trained a linear network until the prediction error is at a minimum using a small subset of the initial samples.
Is there a similar process with the RBFN?
Yes there is,
The main two differences between a multi-layer perceptron and a RBFN are the fact that a RBFN usually implies just one layer and that the activation function is a gaussian instead of a sigmoid.
The training phase can be done using gradient descend of the error loss function, so it is relatively simple to implement.
Keep in mind that RBFN is a linear combination of RBF units, so the range of the output is limited and you would need to transform it if you need an scalar outside of that range.
There is a few of resources that you could consult as reference:
[PDF] (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-6197-223641/unrestricted/Ch3.pdf)
[Wikipedia] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_basis_function_network)
[Wolfram] (http://reference.wolfram.com/applications/neuralnetworks/NeuralNetworkTheory/2.5.2.html)
Hope it helps,