I explore how I built a CNN that performs "zoom and enhance".

1. HOW I MADE
ZOOM IN AND ENHANCE
CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

5. ?

6. 1. SOMEONE ELSE DID IT
2. FINALLY THERE WAS A
LIBRARY I COULD UNDERSTAND

7. THEORY

8. THEORY
▸ A way to compute a function inspired by the human brain
▸ Much simpler than the brain!
▸ Input -> Network -> Output
▸ Comprised of many neurons
▸ These neurons are interconnected
▸ Some are “inputs” and some are “outputs”

9. THEORY
DEEP NETWORKS
▸ Nowadays we have so many neurons that we no longer describe the networks
with them
▸ Instead, we have layers that contain many neurons
▸ When layers are connected to each other, the constituent neurons get
connected
▸ Neurons in different types of layers behave differently from those in other
types

10. TEXT
CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS
▸ CNNs use a layer type called a Spatial Convolution to operate on images
▸ This is a way of connecting neurons so that nearby pixels in 2D images are
connected to nearby neurons
▸ The operation the neurons perform is called convolution and is a generalized
technique for manipulating images
▸ The benefits are that local information gets local connections and the
operation itself is very powerful

11. TEXT
RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS
▸ RNNs use feedback to predict the future!
▸ Most networks are pure functions that process inputs and produce outputs
▸ RNNs feed outputs back into the network to model time
▸ It’s scarily effective

12. THEORY
NETWORK NOTATION
▸ Networks are written like a chemistry formula
▸ Instead of atoms, layer types are used

13. THEORY
TRAINING
▸ We train the network by showing it a bunch of inputs and desired outputs
▸ The training algorithm is called back propagation and involves a lot of
number crunching
▸ Neurons assign weights to the neurons they’re connected to
▸ These weights control how much the neighbors influence that neuron
▸ Training is the process of determining these weights
▸ The number of times a pair have been reused is called an epoch

14. THEORY
MINIMIZE ERROR BY ADJUSTING WEIGHTS

15. THEORY
GENERALIZING
▸ What’s the point of training a network if we already have a bunch of inputs and
outputs?
▸ The hope is that the network will learn how to solve problems it hasn’t yet seen
▸ When we train, we always reserve a batch of validation input and outputs that it
never sees
▸ We then use those inputs and outputs to rate the network

16. PRACTICE

17. PRACTICE
NEURAL NETWORK DISTRIBUTION
▸ While the concepts are universal…
▸ Neural networks are released as source code that can train and execute the network
▸ The code can be in any number of languages and use any number of support libraries
▸ Python with TensorFlow
▸ Lua with Torch
▸ Networks may only work with some hardware
▸ NVIDIA CUDA is used a lot (they invest in academia)
▸ Cloud solutions exist varying from virtualized hardware to proprietary languages

18. PRACTICE
PIX2PIX https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix
▸ 2 Networks: Generator + Discriminator

19. PRACTICE
PREREQUISITES - HARDWARE
LOTS OF
PROCESSING
POWER

21. PRACTICE
INSTALLATION
▸ Install NVIDIA drivers
▸ CUDA - GPU programming SDK
▸ CUDNN - GPU libraries to help writing nets
▸ I did this on Mac and Linux
▸ Install Torch
▸ Lua libraries that can use CUDNN
▸ Install pix2pix

22. PRACTICE
TRAINING
$ DATA_ROOT=./datasets/facades
name=facades_generation
which_direction=AtoB
th train.lua

23. PRACTICE
WE’RE TRAINING!

24. PRACTICE
TRAINING COMPLETE
▸ We get a trained
model file
▸ Contains the
structured of the
network
▸ Along with the
learned weights

25. PRACTICE
RUNNING THE NETWORK
▸ Now that the network is trained, we can run it against new inputs
▸ Put images you want to test in a special folder
▸ Run test.lua instead of train.lua
▸ Now you have outputs!

26. PRACTICE

27. BACK TO
ZOOM AND ENHANCE

28. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
GOOD TRAINING EXAMPLES
▸ It some fooling around to learn what the network can and can’t do
▸ You can’t just throw images at it and hope for the best
▸ You must spend time to give it good training examples
▸ Inputs and outputs should only differ by what you want the network to
learn
▸ Other differences will cause slow or impossible learning
▸ Examples: aspect ratio, cropping / region of interest, backgrounds

29. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
FACE ZOOMING EXAMPLE GENERATION
▸ Narrowed the task down to zooming in on faces
▸ Wrote an app that extracts faces from images using Apple’s CoreImage
framework
▸ Wrote another app that down samples those faces by 8x, then 16x
▸ This only simulates the problem of Z&E since noise is drastically reduced by
this downsampling
▸ Ideally, my inputs and outputs would be taken with the same camera using
two different zoom levels. But alas…

30. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
300 EXAMPLES - NOT JUST ME

31. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
RESULT

32. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
RESULT

33. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
RESULT

34. ZOOM AND ENHANCE
RESULT

35. FUTURE

36. GOTTA GITIT WORKIN
ON MOBILE

37. FUTURE
MOBILE LIBRARIES
▸ TensorFlow is a C++ library that runs on Android & iOS
▸ Miguel de Icaza is binding TensorFlow to .NET (hope it works on mobile!)
▸ https://github.com/migueldeicaza/TensorFlowSharp
▸ Apple includes Metal Performance Shaders that contains basic CNN routines
▸ I’m porting Torch, for now…