Book Image

Hands-On Convolutional Neural Networks with TensorFlow

By : Iffat Zafar, Giounona Tzanidou, Richard Burton, Nimesh Patel, Leonardo Araujo
Book Image

Hands-On Convolutional Neural Networks with TensorFlow

By: Iffat Zafar, Giounona Tzanidou, Richard Burton, Nimesh Patel, Leonardo Araujo

Overview of this book

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are one of the most popular architectures used in computer vision apps. This book is an introduction to CNNs through solving real-world problems in deep learning while teaching you their implementation in popular Python library - TensorFlow. By the end of the book, you will be training CNNs in no time! We start with an overview of popular machine learning and deep learning models, and then get you set up with a TensorFlow development environment. This environment is the basis for implementing and training deep learning models in later chapters. Then, you will use Convolutional Neural Networks to work on problems such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. After that, you will use transfer learning to see how these models can solve other deep learning problems. You will also get a taste of implementing generative models such as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks. Later on, you will see useful tips on machine learning best practices and troubleshooting. Finally, you will learn how to apply your models on large datasets of millions of images.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Storing data in TFRecords


Let's start by considering the example of training a network for image classification. In this case, our data will be a collection of images with an associated label. One way we might store our data is in a directory-like structure of folders. For each label, we will have a folder containing the images belonging to that label:

-Data 
- Person 
   -im1.png 
- Cat 
   -im2.png 
- Dog 
   -im3.png 

Although this might seem a simple way to store our data, it has some major drawbacks as soon as the dataset size becomes too big. One big disadvantage comes when we start loading it.

Opening a file is a time-consuming operation, and having to open many millions of files multiple times is going to add a large overhead to training time. On top of this, as we have our data all split up, it is not going to be in one nice block of memory. The hard drive is going to have to do even more work trying to locate and access them all.

What is the solution? We put them all into a single...