This tutorial explains how to prepare, load and train with image data in MXNet. All IO in MXNet is handled via mx.io.DataIter
and its subclasses, which is explained here. In this tutorial we focus on how to use pre-built data iterators as while as custom iterators to process image data.
There are mainly three ways of loading image data in MXNet:
First, we explain the record io file format used by mxnet:
Record IO is the main file format used by MXNet for data IO. It supports reading and writing on various file systems including distributed file systems like Hadoop HDFS and AWS S3. First, we download the Caltech 101 dataset that contains 101 classes of objects and convert them into record io format:
Setup:
In [1]:
%matplotlib inline
import os
import subprocess
import mxnet as mx
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# change this to your mxnet location
MXNET_HOME = '/scratch/mxnet'
Download and unzip:
In [2]:
os.system('wget http://www.vision.caltech.edu/Image_Datasets/Caltech101/101_ObjectCategories.tar.gz -P data/')
os.chdir('data')
os.system('tar -xf 101_ObjectCategories.tar.gz')
os.chdir('../')
Let's take a look at the data. As you can see, under the root folder every category has a subfolder.
Now let's convert them into record io format. First we need to make a list that contains all the image files and their categories:
In [2]:
os.system('python %s/tools/im2rec.py --list=1 --recursive=1 --shuffle=1 --test-ratio=0.2 data/caltech data/101_ObjectCategories'%MXNET_HOME)
Out[2]:
The resulting list file is in the format index\t(one or more label)\tpath
. In this case there is only one label for each image but you can modify the list to add in more for multi label training.
Then we can use this list to create our record io file:
In [3]:
os.system("python %s/tools/im2rec.py --num-thread=4 --pass-through=1 data/caltech data/101_ObjectCategories"%MXNET_HOME)
Out[3]:
The record io files are now saved at here
In [7]:
data_iter = mx.io.ImageRecordIter(
path_imgrec="./data/caltech_train.rec", # the target record file
data_shape=(3, 227, 227), # output data shape. An 227x227 region will be cropped from the original image.
batch_size=4, # number of samples per batch
resize=256 # resize the shorter edge to 256 before cropping
# ... you can add more augumentation options here. use help(mx.io.ImageRecordIter) to see all possible choices
)
data_iter.reset()
batch = data_iter.next()
data = batch.data[0]
for i in range(4):
plt.subplot(1,4,i+1)
plt.imshow(data[i].asnumpy().astype(np.uint8).transpose((1,2,0)))
plt.show()
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