The most common problem when doing deep learning:
How can I find enough data to learn my models?
Indeed, that's a big problem. Gathering high volume of training data for deep learning purposes is hard. But maybe we can "cheat" a bit?
Images Augmentation
Let's talk about images. When doing Deep Learning, we want to have as diverse set of images as possible, to prevent overfitting. Instead of trying to acquire more of them, we can generate additional images based on existing ones, using various transformations.
There's a great tool made for that. It's called ImageDataGenerator and can be found in the Keras library, under keras.preprocessing.image path. Let's assume that we have a single image, called dog.jpg
Now we want to generate additional samples, based on it. The easiest way to achieve this is to run following code (all options can be found here):
from keras.preprocessing.image import ImageDataGenerator
from keras.preprocessing.image import array_to_img, img_to_array, load_img
input_path = 'dog.jpg'
output_path = 'dog_random{}.jpg'
count = 10
gen = ImageDataGenerator(
rotation_range=20,
width_shift_range=0.2,
height_shift_range=0.2,
horizontal_flip=True
)
# load image to array
image = img_to_array(load_img(input_path))
# reshape to array rank 4
image = image.reshape((1,) + image.shape)
# let's create infinite flow of images
images_flow = gen.flow(image, batch_size=1)
for i, new_images in enumerate(images_flow):
# we access only first image because of batch_size=1
new_image = array_to_img(new_images[0], scale=True)
new_image.save(output_path.format(i + 1))
if i >= count:
break
After running this code, you'll have 10 different images of dogs, like this:
Usage in deep learning
For training our model, we don't need to save images on disk. There's very convenient method for loading all images from directory and generating random samples based on them:
gen = ImageDataGenerator(
rotation_range=20,
width_shift_range=0.2,
height_shift_range=0.2,
horizontal_flip=True
)
train_generator = gen.flow_from_directory(
'data/train',
target_size=(150, 150),
batch_size=32,
class_mode='binary')
# now we can use our generator in model fit method
model.fit_generator(
train_generator,
steps_per_epoch=2000,
epochs=50)
Our images must be strctured in such way that it's possible to read label from their location, for example data/train/dog/dog1.png or data/train/cat/cat1.png. If we have two classes, we should pass class_mode='binary', if more - class_mode='categorical'
You can read more in this awesome Keras Blog article - Building powerful image classification models using very little data.
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