This directory contains code for training and evaluating several widely used Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) image classification models using tf_slim. It contains scripts that allow you to train models from scratch or fine-tune them from pre-trained network weights. It also contains code for downloading standard image datasets, converting them to TensorFlow's native TFRecord format and reading them in using TF-Slim's data reading and queueing utilities. You can easily train any model on any of these datasets, as we demonstrate below. We've also included a jupyter notebook, which provides working examples of how to use TF-Slim for image classification. For developing or modifying your own models, see also the main TF-Slim page.
Maintainers of TF-slim:
- Sergio Guadarrama, github: sguada
"TensorFlow-Slim image classification model library" N. Silberman and S. Guadarrama, 2016. https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/slim
Installation and setup
Preparing the datasets
Using pre-trained models
Training from scratch
Fine tuning to a new task
Evaluating performance
Exporting Inference Graph
Troubleshooting
In this section, we describe the steps required to install the appropriate prerequisite packages.
TF-Slim is available as tf_slim
package. To test that your
installation is working, execute the following command; it should run without
raising any errors.
python -c "import tf_slim as slim; eval = slim.evaluation.evaluate_once"
To use TF-Slim for image classification, you also have to install the TF-Slim image models library, which is not part of the core TF library. To do this, check out the tensorflow/models repository as follows:
cd $HOME/workspace
git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/models/
This will put the TF-Slim image models library in $HOME/workspace/models/research/slim
.
(It will also create a directory called
models/inception,
which contains an older version of slim; you can safely ignore this.)
To verify that this has worked, execute the following commands; it should run without raising any errors.
cd $HOME/workspace/models/research/slim
python -c "from nets import cifarnet; mynet = cifarnet.cifarnet"
As part of this library, we've included scripts to download several popular image datasets (listed below) and convert them to slim format.
Dataset | Training Set Size | Testing Set Size | Number of Classes | Comments |
---|---|---|---|---|
Flowers | 2500 | 2500 | 5 | Various sizes (source: Flickr) |
Cifar10 | 60k | 10k | 10 | 32x32 color |
MNIST | 60k | 10k | 10 | 28x28 gray |
ImageNet | 1.2M | 50k | 1000 | Various sizes |
VisualWakeWords | 82783 | 40504 | 2 | Various sizes (source: MS COCO) |
For each dataset, we'll need to download the raw data and convert it to TensorFlow's native TFRecord format. Each TFRecord contains a TF-Example protocol buffer. Below we demonstrate how to do this for the Flowers dataset.
$ DATA_DIR=/tmp/data/flowers
$ python download_and_convert_data.py \
--dataset_name=flowers \
--dataset_dir="${DATA_DIR}"
When the script finishes you will find several TFRecord files created:
$ ls ${DATA_DIR}
flowers_train-00000-of-00005.tfrecord
...
flowers_train-00004-of-00005.tfrecord
flowers_validation-00000-of-00005.tfrecord
...
flowers_validation-00004-of-00005.tfrecord
labels.txt
These represent the training and validation data, sharded over 5 files each.
You will also find the $DATA_DIR/labels.txt
file which contains the mapping
from integer labels to class names.
You can use the same script to create the mnist, cifar10 and visualwakewords datasets. However, for ImageNet, you have to follow the instructions here. Note that you first have to sign up for an account at image-net.org. Also, the download can take several hours, and could use up to 500GB.
Once the TFRecord files have been created, you can easily define a Slim Dataset, which stores pointers to the data file, as well as various other pieces of metadata, such as the class labels, the train/test split, and how to parse the TFExample protos. We have included the TF-Slim Dataset descriptors for Flowers, Cifar10, MNIST, ImageNet and VisualWakeWords, An example of how to load data using a TF-Slim dataset descriptor using a TF-Slim DatasetDataProvider is found below:
import tensorflow.compat.v1 as tf
import tf_slim as slim
from datasets import flowers
# Selects the 'validation' dataset.
dataset = flowers.get_split('validation', DATA_DIR)
# Creates a TF-Slim DataProvider which reads the dataset in the background
# during both training and testing.
provider = slim.dataset_data_provider.DatasetDataProvider(dataset)
[image, label] = provider.get(['image', 'label'])
Training a model with the ImageNet dataset is a common request. To facilitate working with the ImageNet dataset, we provide an automated script for downloading and processing the ImageNet dataset into the native TFRecord format.
The TFRecord format consists of a set of sharded files where each entry is a serialized tf.Example
proto. Each tf.Example
proto contains the ImageNet image (JPEG encoded) as well as metadata such as label and bounding box information.
We provide a single script for downloading and converting ImageNet data to TFRecord format. Downloading and preprocessing the data may take several hours (up to half a day) depending on your network and computer speed. Please be patient.
To begin, you will need to sign up for an account with [ImageNet] (http://image-net.org) to gain access to the data. Look for the sign up page, create an account and request an access key to download the data.
After you have USERNAME
and PASSWORD
, you are ready to run our script. Make
sure that your hard disk has at least 500 GB of free space for downloading and
storing the data. Here we select DATA_DIR=$HOME/imagenet-data
as such a
location but feel free to edit accordingly.
When you run the below script, please enter USERNAME and PASSWORD when prompted. This will occur at the very beginning. Once these values are entered, you will not need to interact with the script again.
# location of where to place the ImageNet data
DATA_DIR=$HOME/imagenet-data
# build the preprocessing script.
bazel build slim/download_and_convert_imagenet
# run it
bazel-bin/slim/download_and_convert_imagenet "${DATA_DIR}"
The final line of the output script should read:
2016-02-17 14:30:17.287989: Finished writing all 1281167 images in data set.
When the script finishes you will find 1024 and 128 training and validation
files in the DATA_DIR
. The files will match the patterns train-????-of-1024
and validation-?????-of-00128
, respectively.
Congratulations! You are now ready to train or evaluate with the ImageNet data set.
Neural nets work best when they have many parameters, making them powerful function approximators. However, this means they must be trained on very large datasets. Because training models from scratch can be a very computationally intensive process requiring days or even weeks, we provide various pre-trained models, as listed below. These CNNs have been trained on the ILSVRC-2012-CLS image classification dataset.
In the table below, we list each model, the corresponding TensorFlow model file, the link to the model checkpoint, and the top 1 and top 5 accuracy (on the imagenet test set). Note that the VGG and ResNet V1 parameters have been converted from their original caffe formats (here and here), whereas the Inception and ResNet V2 parameters have been trained internally at Google. Also be aware that these accuracies were computed by evaluating using a single image crop. Some academic papers report higher accuracy by using multiple crops at multiple scales.
^ ResNet V2 models use Inception pre-processing and input image size of 299 (use
--preprocessing_name inception --eval_image_size 299
when using
eval_image_classifier.py
). Performance numbers for ResNet V2 models are
reported on the ImageNet validation set.
(#) More information and details about the NASNet architectures are available at this README
All 16 float MobileNet V1 models reported in the MobileNet Paper and all 16 quantized TensorFlow Lite compatible MobileNet V1 models can be found here.
(^#) More details on MobileNetV2 models can be found here.
(*): Results quoted from the paper.
Here is an example of how to download the Inception V3 checkpoint:
$ CHECKPOINT_DIR=/tmp/checkpoints
$ mkdir ${CHECKPOINT_DIR}
$ wget http://download.tensorflow.org/models/inception_v3_2016_08_28.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf inception_v3_2016_08_28.tar.gz
$ mv inception_v3.ckpt ${CHECKPOINT_DIR}
$ rm inception_v3_2016_08_28.tar.gz
We provide an easy way to train a model from scratch using any TF-Slim dataset. The following example demonstrates how to train Inception V3 using the default parameters on the ImageNet dataset.
DATASET_DIR=/tmp/imagenet
TRAIN_DIR=/tmp/train_logs
python train_image_classifier.py \
--train_dir=${TRAIN_DIR} \
--dataset_name=imagenet \
--dataset_split_name=train \
--dataset_dir=${DATASET_DIR} \
--model_name=inception_v3
This process may take several days, depending on your hardware setup. For convenience, we provide a way to train a model on multiple GPUs, and/or multiple CPUs, either synchrononously or asynchronously. See model_deploy for details.
To visualize the losses and other metrics during training, you can use TensorBoard by running the command below.
tensorboard --logdir=${TRAIN_DIR}
Once TensorBoard is running, navigate your web browser to http://localhost:6006.
Rather than training from scratch, we'll often want to start from a pre-trained
model and fine-tune it.
To indicate a checkpoint from which to fine-tune, we'll call training with
the --checkpoint_path
flag and assign it an absolute path to a checkpoint
file.
When fine-tuning a model, we need to be careful about restoring checkpoint
weights. In particular, when we fine-tune a model on a new task with a different
number of output labels, we wont be able restore the final logits (classifier)
layer. For this, we'll use the --checkpoint_exclude_scopes
flag. This flag
hinders certain variables from being loaded. When fine-tuning on a
classification task using a different number of classes than the trained model,
the new model will have a final 'logits' layer whose dimensions differ from the
pre-trained model. For example, if fine-tuning an ImageNet-trained model on
Flowers, the pre-trained logits layer will have dimensions [2048 x 1001]
but
our new logits layer will have dimensions [2048 x 5]
. Consequently, this
flag indicates to TF-Slim to avoid loading these weights from the checkpoint.
Keep in mind that warm-starting from a checkpoint affects the model's weights
only during the initialization of the model. Once a model has started training,
a new checkpoint will be created in ${TRAIN_DIR}
. If the fine-tuning
training is stopped and restarted, this new checkpoint will be the one from
which weights are restored and not the ${checkpoint_path}$
. Consequently,
the flags --checkpoint_path
and --checkpoint_exclude_scopes
are only used
during the 0-
th global step (model initialization). Typically for fine-tuning
one only want train a sub-set of layers, so the flag --trainable_scopes
allows
to specify which subsets of layers should trained, the rest would remain frozen.
Below we give an example of fine-tuning inception-v3 on flowers, inception_v3 was trained on ImageNet with 1000 class labels, but the flowers dataset only have 5 classes. Since the dataset is quite small we will only train the new layers.
$ DATASET_DIR=/tmp/flowers
$ TRAIN_DIR=/tmp/flowers-models/inception_v3
$ CHECKPOINT_PATH=/tmp/my_checkpoints/inception_v3.ckpt
$ python train_image_classifier.py \
--train_dir=${TRAIN_DIR} \
--dataset_dir=${DATASET_DIR} \
--dataset_name=flowers \
--dataset_split_name=train \
--model_name=inception_v3 \
--checkpoint_path=${CHECKPOINT_PATH} \
--checkpoint_exclude_scopes=InceptionV3/Logits,InceptionV3/AuxLogits \
--trainable_scopes=InceptionV3/Logits,InceptionV3/AuxLogits
To evaluate the performance of a model (whether pretrained or your own), you can use the eval_image_classifier.py script, as shown below.
Below we give an example of downloading the pretrained inception model and evaluating it on the imagenet dataset.
CHECKPOINT_FILE = ${CHECKPOINT_DIR}/inception_v3.ckpt # Example
$ python eval_image_classifier.py \
--alsologtostderr \
--checkpoint_path=${CHECKPOINT_FILE} \
--dataset_dir=${DATASET_DIR} \
--dataset_name=imagenet \
--dataset_split_name=validation \
--model_name=inception_v3
See the evaluation module example for an example of how to evaluate a model at multiple checkpoints during or after the training.
Saves out a GraphDef containing the architecture of the model.
To use it with a model name defined by slim, run:
$ python export_inference_graph.py \
--alsologtostderr \
--model_name=inception_v3 \
--output_file=/tmp/inception_v3_inf_graph.pb
$ python export_inference_graph.py \
--alsologtostderr \
--model_name=mobilenet_v1 \
--image_size=224 \
--output_file=/tmp/mobilenet_v1_224.pb
If you then want to use the resulting model with your own or pretrained checkpoints as part of a mobile model, you can run freeze_graph to get a graph def with the variables inlined as constants using:
bazel build tensorflow/python/tools:freeze_graph
bazel-bin/tensorflow/python/tools/freeze_graph \
--input_graph=/tmp/inception_v3_inf_graph.pb \
--input_checkpoint=/tmp/checkpoints/inception_v3.ckpt \
--input_binary=true --output_graph=/tmp/frozen_inception_v3.pb \
--output_node_names=InceptionV3/Predictions/Reshape_1
The output node names will vary depending on the model, but you can inspect and estimate them using the summarize_graph tool:
bazel build tensorflow/tools/graph_transforms:summarize_graph
bazel-bin/tensorflow/tools/graph_transforms/summarize_graph \
--in_graph=/tmp/inception_v3_inf_graph.pb
To run the resulting graph in C++, you can look at the label_image sample code:
bazel build tensorflow/examples/label_image:label_image
bazel-bin/tensorflow/examples/label_image/label_image \
--image=${HOME}/Pictures/flowers.jpg \
--input_layer=input \
--output_layer=InceptionV3/Predictions/Reshape_1 \
--graph=/tmp/frozen_inception_v3.pb \
--labels=/tmp/imagenet_slim_labels.txt \
--input_mean=0 \
--input_std=255
See Model Runs out of CPU memory.
The ImageNet dataset provided has an empty background class which can be used to fine-tune the model to other tasks. If you try training or fine-tuning the VGG or ResNet models using the ImageNet dataset, you might encounter the following error:
InvalidArgumentError: Assign requires shapes of both tensors to match. lhs shape= [1001] rhs shape= [1000]
This is due to the fact that the VGG and ResNet V1 final layers have only 1000 outputs rather than 1001.
To fix this issue, you can set the --labels_offset=1
flag. This results in
the ImageNet labels being shifted down by one:
The preprocessing functions all take height
and width
as parameters. You
can change the default values using the following snippet:
image_preprocessing_fn = preprocessing_factory.get_preprocessing(
preprocessing_name,
height=MY_NEW_HEIGHT,
width=MY_NEW_WIDTH,
is_training=True)